all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?’ These words speak to my heart.  I can interpret them by my own nature, and I rest on them.  If there is a fathomless mystery of sin and sorrow, there is a deeper mystery of God’s love.  So, Mary, I try Candace’s way,—­I look at Christ,—­I pray to Him.  If he that hath seen Him hath seen the Father, it is enough.  I rest there,—­I wait.  What I know not now I shall know hereafter.”

Mary kept all things and pondered them in her heart.  She could speak to no one,—­not to her mother, nor to her spiritual guide; for had she not passed to a region beyond theirs?  As well might those on the hither side of mortality instruct the souls gone beyond the veil as souls outside a great affliction guide those who are struggling in it.  That is a mighty baptism, and only Christ can go down with us into those waters.

Mrs. Scudder and the Doctor only marked that she was more than ever conscientious in every duty, and that she brought to life’s daily realities something of the calmness and disengagedness of one whose soul has been wrenched by a mighty shock from all moorings here below.  Hopes did not excite, fears did not alarm her; life had no force strong enough to awaken a thrill within; and the only subjects on which she ever spoke with any degree of ardor were religious subjects.

One who should have seen moving about the daily ministrations of the cottage a pale girl, whose steps were firm, whose eye was calm, whose hands were ever busy, would scarce imagine that through that silent heart were passing tides of thought that measured a universe; but it was even so.  Through that one gap of sorrow flowed in the whole awful mystery of existence, and silently, as she spun and sewed, she thought over and over again all that she had ever been taught, and compared and revolved it by the light of a dawning inward revelation.

Sorrow is the great birth-agony of immortal powers,—­sorrow is the great searcher and revealer of hearts, the great test of truth; for Plato has wisely said, sorrow will not endure sophisms,—­all shams and unrealities melt in the fire of that awful furnace.  Sorrow reveals forces in ourselves we never dreamed of.  The soul, a bound and sleeping prisoner, hears her knock on her cell-door, and wakens.  Oh, how narrow the walls! oh, how close and dark the grated window! how the long useless wings beat against the impassable barriers!  Where are we?  What is this prison?  What is beyond?  Oh for more air, more light!  When will the door be opened?  The soul seems to itself to widen and deepen; it trembles at its own dreadful forces; it gathers up in waves that break with wailing only to flow back into the everlasting void.  The calmest and most centred natures are sometimes thrown by the shock of a great sorrow into a tumultuous amazement.  All things are changed.  The earth no longer seems solid, the skies no longer secure; a deep abyss seems underlying every joyous scene of life.  The soul, struck with this awful inspiration, is a mournful Cassandra; she sees blood on every threshold, and shudders in the midst of mirth and festival with the weight of a terrible wisdom.