Then her great sorrow came.  In a moment she lost everything dear to her.  They called it an accident.  She held God accountable and in bitterness and anger turned her back upon all the facts.  The months passed and her health breaking she was obliged to leave college.  At the beautiful health resort to which she went she met a girl she had known well when a little child.  They renewed the friendship.  Then the girl’s sorrow came.  It was not death, it was far worse, scandal and disgrace in her family, which had been unstained before.  Out of a clear sky it came.

In amazement Ruth watched her friend.  She saw her suffer but she saw no conquering bitterness, heard no words of wild rebellion.  She looked into a sweet calm face and saw a girl less than twenty, with life’s conditions changed in a moment, adjust herself to the new conditions and go on.  Seeking a solution she questioned her friend and met a Person.  Day after day as she saw Him revealed in that heroic life, as she beheld the girl overcoming in His strength natural resentment against the injustice and unkindness of those who would make her suffer for the sins of her parents, the facts were swallowed up in the Person and she loved Him.

Together, the past summer, in a rest camp for mothers and babies they worked out the commands of the Person who had made it possible for them to take up life after bitter loss and find it sweet.

If one could summon to a central place the girls who have met the Person what an inspiration they would be!  Of every sort and condition, of every color and nation, speaking languages new and old and dialects that have never been written, all uniting in the testimony that He has made life great for them.

The facts are in chaotic state.  Parts of truth and segments of universal fact are waiting for man to unite them.  Only the perfect whole can speak with certainty and we must wait for that.  The creeds are countless.  They do not matter much.  The Person said little about them.  They are just our poor attempts to put in words—­God and His will.  It is

  “Not the Christ of our subtile creeds
    But the Lord of our hearts, of our homes,
  Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs;
  The brother of want and blame,
    The lover of woman and men,
  With a love that puts to shame
    All passions of mortal ken.”

The only way to meet a fact is to face it, follow it and see where it will lead.  It is prejudice that blinds one’s eyes to facts.  It is only man’s limited vision, that makes a part seem as a whole, that accepts as fact the thing he would like to be a fact, that one need fear.  Facts that are facts need never cause one to doubt.  For fact is truth and truth leads to God.  The business of every church and every teacher of religion is to discover the facts, and present the Person.