that in order to change ourselves, an actual regeneration of the will is necessary.  For awhile, perchance, we despair of this.  The effort to get out of the rut we have made for ourselves seems of no avail.  And it is not, indeed, until we arrive, gradually or otherwise, and through a proper interpretation of the life of Christ, at the conviction that we may even never become useful in the divine scheme that we have a sense of what is called ‘the forgiveness of sins.’  This conviction, this grace, this faith to embark on the experiment accomplishes of itself the revival of the will, the rebirth which we had thought impossible.  We discover our task, high or humble,—­our cause.  We grow marvellously at one with God’s purpose, and we feel that our will is acting in the same direction as his.  And through our own atonement we see the meaning of that other Atonement which led Christ to the Cross.  We see that our conviction, our grace, has come through him, and how he died for our sins.”

“It’s quite wonderful how logical and simple you make it, how thoroughly you have gone into it.  You have solved it for yourself—­and you will solve it for others many others.”

She rose, and he, too, got to his feet with a medley of feelings.  The path along which they walked was already littered with green acorns.  A gray squirrel darted ahead of them, gained a walnut and paused, quivering, halfway up the trunk, to gaze back at them.  And the glance she presently gave him seemed to partake of the shyness of the wild thing.

“Thank you for explaining it to me,” she said.

“I hope you don’t think—­” he began.

“Oh, it isn’t that!” she cried, with unmistakable reproach.  “I asked you —­I made you tell me.  It hasn’t seemed at all like—­the confessional,” she added, and smiled and blushed at the word.  “You have put it so nicely, so naturally, and you have given me so much to think about.  But it all depends—­doesn’t it?—­upon whether one can feel the underlying truth of which you spoke in the first place; it rests upon a sense of the prevailing goodness of things.  It seems to me cruel that what is called salvation, the solution of the problem of life, should depend upon an accidental discovery.  We are all turned loose with our animal passions and instincts, of self-preservation, by an indifferent Creator, in a wilderness, and left to find our way out as best we can.  You answer that Christ showed us the way.  There are elements in his teaching I cannot accept—­perhaps because I have been given a wrong interpretation of them.  I shall ask you more questions some day.

“But even then,” she continued, “granted that Christ brought the complete solution, as you say, why should so many millions have lived and died, before and after his coming, who had suffered so, and who had never heard of him?  That is the way my reason works, and I can’t help it.  I would help it if I could.”

“Isn’t it enough,” he asked, “to know that a force is at work combating evil,—­even if you are not yet convinced that it is a prevailing force?  Can you not trust that it will be a prevailing force, if your sympathies are with it, without demanding a revelation of the entire scheme of the universe?  Of what use is it to doubt the eternal justice?”