“Mary,” she said, gently, “I hope you will forget all I said to you that dreadful day.  It had to be said, or I should have died.  Mary, I begin to think that it is not best to stretch our minds with reasonings where we are so limited, where we can know so little.  I am quite sure there must be dreadful mistakes somewhere.

“It seems to me irreverent and shocking that a child should oppose a father, or a creature its Creator.  I never should have done it, only that, where direct questions are presented to the judgment, one cannot help judging.  If one is required to praise a being as just and good, one must judge of his actions by some standard of right,—­and we have no standard but such as our Creator has placed in us.  I have been told it was my duty to attend to these subjects, and I have tried to,—­and the result has been that the facts presented seem wholly irreconcilable with any notions of justice or mercy that I am able to form.  If these be the facts, I can only say that my nature is made entirely opposed to them.  If I followed the standard of right they present, and acted according to my small mortal powers on the same principles, I should be a very bad person.  Any father, who should make such use of power over his children as they say the Deity does with regard to us, would be looked upon as a monster by our very imperfect moral sense.  Yet I cannot say that the facts are not so.  When I heard the Doctor’s sermons on ’Sin a Necessary Means of the Greatest Good,’ I could not extricate myself from the reasoning.

“I have thought, in desperate moments, of giving up the Bible itself.  But what do I gain?  Do I not see the same difficulty in Nature?  I see everywhere a Being whose main ends seem to be beneficent, but whose good purposes are worked out at terrible expense of suffering, and apparently by the total sacrifice of myriads of sensitive creatures.  I see unflinching order, general good-will, but no sympathy, no mercy.  Storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, sickness, death, go on without regarding us.  Everywhere I see the most hopeless, unrelieved suffering,—­and for aught I see, it may be eternal.  Immortality is a dreadful chance, and I would rather never have been.—­The Doctor’s dreadful system is, I confess, much like the laws of Nature,—­about what one might reason out from them.

“There is but just one thing remaining, and that is, as Candace said, the cross of Christ.  If God so loved us,—­if He died for us,—­greater love hath no man than this.  It seems to me that love is shown here in the two highest forms possible to our comprehension.  We see a Being who gives himself for us,—­and more than that, harder than that, a Being who consents to the suffering of a dearer than self.  Mary, I feel that I must love more, to give up one of my children to suffer, than to consent to suffer myself.  There is a world of comfort to me in the words, ’He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us