“Why, I’d seen him on Dalton Street with the children following him, and I saw him again that day of the funeral.  Some of the girls I knew used to laugh at him.  We thought he was queer.  And then, when you brought me to him that morning and he got up and treated me like a lady, I just couldn’t stand it.  I never felt so terrible in my life.  I just wanted to die, right then and there.  Something inside of me kept pressing and pressing, until I thought I would die.  I knew what it was to hate myself, but I never hated myself as I have since then.

“He never says anything about God, and you don’t, but when he comes in here he seems like God to me.  He’s so peaceful,—­he makes me peaceful.  I remember the minister in Madison,—­he was a putty-faced man with indigestion,—­and when he prayed he used to close his eyes and try to look pious, but he never fooled me.  He never made me believe he knew anything about God.  And don’t think for a minute he’d have done what you and Miss Grower and Mr. Bentley did!  He used to cross the street to get out of the way of drunken men—­he wouldn’t have one of them in his church.  And I know of a girl he drove out of town because she had a baby and her sweetheart wouldn’t marry her.  He sent her to hell.  Hell’s here—­isn’t it?”

These sudden remarks of hers surprised and troubled him.  But they had another effect, a constructive effect.  He was astonished, in going over such conversations afterwards, to discover that her questions and his efforts to answer them in other than theological terms were both illuminating and stimulating.  Sayings in the Gospels leaped out in his mind, fired with new meanings; so simple, once perceived, that he was amazed not to have seen them before.  And then he was conscious of a palpitating joy which left in its wake a profound thankfulness.  He made no attempt as yet to correlate these increments, these glimpses of truth into a system, but stored them preciously away.

He taxed his heart and intellect to answer her sensible and helpfully, and thus found himself avoiding the logic, the Greek philosophy, the outworn and meaningless phrases of speculation; found himself employing (with extraordinary effect upon them both) the simple words from which many of these theories had been derived.  “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”  What she saw in Horace Bentley, he explained, was God.  God wished us to know how to live, in order that we might find happiness, and therefore Christ taught us that the way to find happiness was to teach others how to live,—­once we found out.  Such was the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation, to teach us how to live in order that we might find God and happiness.  And Hodder translated for her the word Incarnation.

Now, he asked, how were we to recognize God, how might we know how he wished us to live, unless we saw him in human beings, in the souls into which he had entered?  In Mr. Bentley’s soul?  Was this too deep?