more plainly how little he had sided, how hard he had fought with them.  The very imperfections he repudiated gathered him honor in the eyes of her love, sowed seeds of perennial tenderness in her heart.  She saw how, in those last days, he had been overcoming the world with accelerated victory, and growing more and more of the real father that no man can be until he has attained to the sonship.  The marvel is that our children are so tender and so trusting to the slow developing father in us.  The truth and faith which the great Father has put in the heart of the child, makes him the nursing father of the fatherhood in his father; and thus in part it is, that the children of men will come at last to know the great Father.  The family, with all its powers for the development of society, is a family because it is born and rooted in, and grows out of the very bosom of God.  Gabriel told Zacharias that his son John, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord, should turn the hearts of the fathers to the children.

Few griefs can be so paralyzing as, for a time, that of a true daughter upon the departure, which at first she feels as the loss, of a true parent; but through the rifts of such heartbreaks the light of love shines clearer, and where love is, there is eternity:  one day He who is the Householder of the universe, will begin to bring out of its treasury all the good old things, as well as the better new ones.  How true must be the bliss up to which the intense realities of such sorrows are needful to force the way for the faithless heart and feeble will!  Lord, like Thy people of old, we need yet the background of the thunder-cloud against which to behold Thee; but one day the only darkness around Thy dwelling will be the too much of Thy brightness.  For Thou art the perfection which every heart sighs toward, no mind can attain unto.  If Thou wast One whom created mind could embrace, Thou wouldst be too small for those whom Thou hast made in Thine own image, the infinite creatures that seek their God, a Being to love and know infinitely.  For the created to know perfectly would be to be damned forever in the nutshell of the finite.  He who is His own cause, alone can understand perfectly and remain infinite, for that which is known and that which knows are in Him the same infinitude.

Faber came to see Dorothy—­solemn, sad, kind.  He made no attempt at condolence, did not speak a word of comfort; but he talked of the old man, revealing for him a deep respect; and her heart was touched, and turned itself toward him.  Some change, she thought, must have passed upon him.  Her father had told her nothing of his relation to Amanda.  It would have to be done some day, but he shrunk from it.  She could not help suspecting there was more between Faber and him than she had at first imagined; but there was in her a healthy contentment with ignorance, and she asked no questions.  Neither did Faber make any attempt to find out whether she