“How do you account for that fancy, now, Mr Weir?”

“I’ve often thought about it, sir, but I never could account for it.  I’m none willing to think it’s a ghost; for what’s the good of it?  I’ve turned out that cupboard over and over, and there’s nothing there I don’t know.”

“You’re not afraid of it, are you?”

“No, sir.  Why should I be?  I never did it no harm.  And God can surely take care of me from all sorts.”

My readers must not think anything is going to come out of this strange illusion of the old man’s brain.  I questioned him a little more about it, and came simply to the conclusion, that when he was a child he had found the door open and had wandered into the house, at the time uninhabited, had peeped in at the door of the same room where he now lay, and had actually seen a man in the position he described, half in the cupboard, searching for something.  His mind had kept the impression after the conscious memory had lost its hold of the circumstance, and now revived it under certain physical conditions.  It was a glimpse out of one of the many stories which haunted the old mansion.  But there he lay like a child, as he said, fearless even of such usurpations upon his senses.

I think instances of quiet unSELFconscious faith are more common than is generally supposed.  Few have along with it the genial communicative impulse of old Samuel Weir, which gives the opportunity of seeing into their hidden world.  He seemed to have been, and to have remained, a child, in the best sense of the word.  He had never had much trouble with himself, for he was of a kindly, gentle, trusting nature; and his will had never been called upon to exercise any strong effort to enable him to walk in the straight path.  Nor had his intellect, on the other hand, while capable enough, ever been so active as to suggest difficulties to his faith, leaving him, even theoretically, far nearer the truth than those who start objections for their own sakes, liking to feel themselves in a position of supposed antagonism to the generally acknowledged sources of illumination.  For faith is in itself a light that lightens even the intellect, and hence the shield of the complete soldier of God, the shield of faith, is represented by Spenser as “framed all of diamond, perfect, pure, and clean,” (the power of the diamond to absorb and again radiate light being no poetic fiction, but a well-known scientific fact,) whose light falling upon any enchantment or false appearance, destroys it utterly:  for

   “all that was not such as seemed in sight. 
    Before that shield did fade, and suddaine fall.”