is that to me?” he would return.  “I remain what I am.”  Then grew up in the mind of the minister the following plant of thought:  “Things divine can only be shadowed in the human; what is in man must be understood of God with the divine difference—­not only of degree, but of kind, involved in the fact that He makes me, I can make nothing, and if I could, should yet be no less a creature of Him the Creator; therefore, as the heavens are higher than the earth, so His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and what we call His forgiveness may be, must be something altogether transcending the conception of man—­overwhelming to such need as even that of Paul Faber, whose soul has begun to hunger after righteousness, and whose hunger must be a hunger that will not easily be satisfied.”  For a poor nature will for a time be satisfied with a middling God; but as the nature grows richer, the ideal of the God desired grows greater.  The true man can be satisfied only with a God of magnificence, never with a God such as in his childhood and youth had been presented to Faber as the God of the Bible.  That God only whom Christ reveals to the humble seeker, can ever satisfy human soul.

Then it came into the minister’s mind, thinking over Faber’s religion toward his fellows, and his lack toward God, how when the young man asked Jesus what commandments he must keep up that he might inherit eternal life, Jesus did not say a word concerning those of the first table—­not a word, that is, about his duty toward God; He spoke only of his duty toward man.  Then it struck him that our Lord gave him no sketch or summary or part of a religious system—­only told him what he asked, the practical steps by which he might begin to climb toward eternal life.  One thing he lacked—­namely, God Himself, but as to how God would meet him, Jesus says nothing, but Himself meets him on those steps with the offer of God.  He treats the duties of the second table as a stair to the first—­a stair which, probably by its crumbling away in failure beneath his feet as he ascended, would lift him to such a vision and such a horror of final frustration, as would make him stretch forth his hands, like the sinking Peter, to the living God, the life eternal which he blindly sought, without whose closest presence he could never do the simplest duty aright, even of those he had been doing from his youth up.  His measure of success, and his sense of utter failure, would together lift him toward the One Good.

Thus, looking out upon truth from the cave of his brother’s need, and seeing the direction in which the shadow of his atheism fell, the minister learned in what direction the clouded light lay, and turning his gaze thitherward, learned much.  It is only the aged who have dropped thinking that become stupid.  Such can learn no more, until first their young nurse Death has taken off their clothes, and put the old babies to bed.  Of such was not Walter Drake.  Certain of his formerly petted doctrines