The thought, half way to an answer, did not come to Richard then. What if we are not yet able to understand her secret—therefore not able to see it, although it lies open before us? What if the difficulty lies in us! What if Nature is doing her best to reveal! What if God is working to make us know—if we would but let him—as fast as he can!

There is one thing that will not be pictured, cannot be made logically present to the mind by any effort of the imagination—one thing that requires the purest faith. That is a man’s own ignorance and incapacity. When a man knows, then first he gets a glimpse of his ignorance as it vanishes. Ignorance cannot be the object of knowledge. We must believe ourselves ignorant. And for that we must be humble of heart.

For God is infinite, and we are his little ones, and his truth is eternally better than the best shape in which we see it. Jesus is perfect, but is our idea of him perfect? One thing only is changeless truth in us, and that is—obedient faith in him and his father. Even that has to grow. It is by acting upon what he sees and knows, hearkening to every whisper, obeying every hint of the good, following whatever seems light, that the man will at length arrive. Thus obedient, instead of burying himself in the darkness about its roots, he climbs to the tree-top of his being. For in his climbing, the man will, somewhere in his progress upward, the progress of obedience, awake to know that the same spirit is in him that is in the things he beholds. Then is being, and in it the growth of being, laid open to him. God is the world, the atmosphere, the element, the substance, the essence of his life. In him he lives and moves and has his being. Now he lives indeed, for his Origin is his, and this rounds his being to eternity.

So long as a man is satisfied, he seeks nothing. When a fresh gulf is opened in his being, he must rise and find that which will fill it. Our history is the opening of such gulfs, and the search for what will fill them.

But Richard was yet far from raising his head above the cloudy region of moods into the blue air of the unchangeable. As the days went by and brought him no word from Barbara, the darkness began to gather around him. The sad consolations of nature by degrees left him—they became all sadness and no consolation. The winter of his soul crept steadily upon him, laden with frost and death. He went back to his stern denial of God, thinking he had no need of a God because he had no hope in any.