“Yes, Dorrie, I do.  I have often asked myself that same question,” replied her companion, gravely.

“How lovely it would be if there was some one living now who could say to me, ‘Take up thy bed and walk,’ and I could do it,” she continued, with a note of yearning in her voice that smote sharply on her listener’s heart.  “Don’t you believe that when Jesus went away He meant to have people keep on healing, and teaching others how to heal, just as He had done?”

“Perhaps He did, pet; but you know everybody thinks that those were ‘days of miracles,’ which were simply intended to establish the divinity of the Savior and His authority to teach the new gospel.”

“Yes, I know everybody says that whenever I ask anything about it,” Dorothy returned, with an involuntary shrug of impatience, “but, somehow, it doesn’t seem fair to me that all sick people cannot be healed in the same way.  Jesus’ way was certainly the best way to cure people—­so much better than making them take horrid medicines and—­and cutting them up with knives,” and a shiver ran over her slight form as she concluded.

“Let us talk of something else, Dorrie.  I do not like to have you dwell upon that subject,” said her uncle, with a spasmodic contraction of his lips.

“Well, I will try not to,” she said, with a faint sigh.  “But truly, Uncle Phil, I can’t help thinking that it was never intended that Jesus’ way should be stopped any more than the ’new gospel,’ as you call it, was meant to be forgotten, or lost, after His resurrection.  I think that the healing was a part of the ’new gospel.’”

“Well, Miss Thoughtful, that is certainly a good argument,” returned her companion, smiling into the earnest, uplifted eyes.  “But who has been talking to you to set you to reasoning so deeply on the subject?”

He was wondering if Katherine Minturn might not have dropped a seed of her doctrine into the receptive mind of his niece.

“Nobody—­I just thought it out for myself.  You see I can’t do much but think, and I often get very puzzled about God and the queer things He lets happen.  You know it says in the Bible that He is ‘too pure to behold Iniquity,’ or evil—­and ’does not regard it with any degree of allowance’; and yet there seems to be more sin, sickness and dreadful accidents than anything else in the world.”

“It is a mystery, I confess; but what makes you think that Jesus intended that His way of healing should be continued after His ascension?” inquired her uncle, who was deeply interested in the child’s reasoning.

“Why, you see, just before He went away He had a talk with His disciples and gave them some last commands.  He told them to go everywhere and preach to everybody—­to ’heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out sin or devils.’  Now, Uncle Phil, that command is all one—­the first part of it says ’heal the sick, raise the dead,’ then comes the rest of it—­’cast out sin;’ and I don’t see what right people have to pick it to pieces and say He didn’t mean them to obey any but the last part of it.”