can’t help knowing something about God, even if we’ve never heard the Gospel, the good news that our Saviour brought us.  For we know everything comes from God:  don’t you say almost every day, ’This and that will happen, please God,’ and ’We shall begin to cut the grass soon, please God to send us a little more sunshine’?  We know very well we are altogether in the hands of God.  We didn’t bring ourselves into the world, we can’t keep ourselves alive while we’re sleeping; the daylight, and the wind, and the corn, and the cows to give us milk—­everything we have comes from God.  And he gave us our souls and put love between parents and children, and husband and wife.  But is that as much as we want to know about God?  We see he is great and mighty, and can do what he will:  we are lost, as if we was struggling in great waters, when we try to think of him.

“But perhaps doubts come into your mind like this:  Can God take much notice of us poor people?  Perhaps he only made the world for the great and the wise and the rich.  It doesn’t cost him much to give us our little handful of victual and bit of clothing; but how do we know he cares for us any more than we care for the worms and things in the garden, so as we rear our carrots and onions?  Will God take care of us when we die?  And has he any comfort for us when we are lame and sick and helpless?  Perhaps, too, he is angry with us; else why does the blight come, and the bad harvests, and the fever, and all sorts of pain and trouble?  For our life is full of trouble, and if God sends us good, he seems to send bad too.  How is it?  How is it?

“Ah, dear friends, we are in sad want of good news about God; and what does other good news signify if we haven’t that?  For everything else comes to an end, and when we die we leave it all.  But God lasts when everything else is gone.  What shall we do if he is not our friend?”

Then Dinah told how the good news had been brought, and how the mind of God towards the poor had been made manifest in the life of Jesus, dwelling on its lowliness and its acts of mercy.

“So you see, dear friends,” she went on, “Jesus spent his time almost all in doing good to poor people; he preached out of doors to them, and he made friends of poor workmen, and taught them and took pains with them.  Not but what he did good to the rich too, for he was full of love to all men, only he saw as the poor were more in want of his help.  So he cured the lame and the sick and the blind, and he worked miracles to feed the hungry because, he said, he was sorry for them; and he was very kind to the little children and comforted those who had lost their friends; and he spoke very tenderly to poor sinners that were sorry for their sins.

“Ah, wouldn’t you love such a man if you saw him—­if he were here in this village?  What a kind heart he must have!  What a friend he would be to go to in trouble!  How pleasant it must be to be taught by him.