“Before I could answer you concerning such a man, I should want to know whether he had been doing as he knew he ought to do, living as he knew he ought to live. Or had he been spoiling himself and thus also spoiling the thing that God had made, by not doing what he knew he should do, so that by wrong-doing he had injured his deepest faculty of understanding.”

“What could be done for such a man?”

“God knows—God does know. I think he will make his very life a terrible burden, so that for pure misery he will cry to him.”

“But suppose he was a man who tried to do right, who tried to help his neighbour, who was at least so far a good man as to deny the God that most people seem to believe in—what would you say then?”

“I would say, ‘Have patience.’ If there be a good God, he cannot be altogether dissatisfied with such a man. Of course there is something lacking in such a man that makes him think as he does, and it may be he is to blame for it. But it may also be that he cannot help it. I do not know when any man has arrived at the point of development at which he is capable of believing in God—the child of a savage may be capable, and a gray-haired man of science incapable. If such a man says, ‘The question of a God is not interesting to me,’ I believe him. But if he be such a man as you have described, I believe also, as it is the God of patience who is taking care of him, that the time must come when something will make him want to know whether there be a God, and whether he cannot discover his presence and get near him. I would say, he is in God’s school, don’t be too much troubled about him, as if God might overlook and forget him. He will see to all that concerns him. He has made him, and he loves him, and he is doing and will do his very best for him.”

“Oh, I am so glad to hear you speak like that!” cried Barbara. “I didn’t know clergymen were like that! I’m sure they don’t talk like that in the pulpit!”