He looked at us, smiling as he said this, which he evidently considered unanswerable.

“You are quite right,” said my husband, gravely.  “It is impossible that nothing should produce God, and therefore I say God is eternal.  It is not impossible that something should produce the world, and therefore I believe the world is not eternal.  That point is the one on which the whole argument hangs in my mind.”

“It does not become me to dispute a clergyman,” said Mr. Remington, smiling affectedly, as if only courtesy prevented his coming in with an entirely demolishing argument.

To my great surprise Lulu instantly answered, and with an intelligence that showed she had followed the argument entirely,—­

“I am certain, George, that Mr. Prince has altogether the best of it.  Yours is merely a technical difficulty,—­merely words.  You can conceive a thousand things which you can never fully comprehend.  And this, too, is a proof of the Infinite Father in our very reasoning,—­that, if we could comprehend Him, we should be ourselves infinite.  As it is, we can believe and adore,—­and, more than that, rejoice that we cannot in this finite life of ours do more.”

“If we believed we could comprehend Him,” said I, “we should soon begin to meddle with God’s administration of affairs.”

“Yes,—­and in fatalism I have always thought there was a profound reverence,” said Lulu.

“Oh, are you going into theological mysteries, too?” said Remington, with a laugh in which none of us joined; “what care you, Lulu, for the quiddities of Absolute Illimitation and Infinite Illimitation?  After all, what matters it whether one believes in a God, who you allow to be the personation of all excellence, if only one endeavors to act up to the highest conceivable standard of perfection,—­I mean of human perfection,—­leaving, of course, a liberal margin for human frailties and defects?  One wouldn’t like to leave out mercy, you know.”

Whatever might be the real sentiments of the man, there was an air of levity in his mode of treating the most important subjects of thought which displeased me, especially when he said, “You adore the Incomprehensible; I am contented to adore, with silent reverence, the lovely works of His hand.”  He pointed his remark without hesitation at LuLu, who sat looking into the fire, and did not notice him or it.

“You are quite right, Mr. Prince, and my cousin, is quite wrong,” said she, looking up with a docile, childlike expression, at the minister.  “One feels that all through, though one may not be able to reason or argue about it.”

“And the best evidence of all truth, my dear,” answered the delighted Dominie, “is that intuition which is before all reasoning, and by which we must try reasoning itself.  The moral is before the intellectual; and that is why we preachers continually insist on faith as an illuminator of the reason.”

“You mean that we should cultivate faith,” I said.