He turned away and went back to his room. There, with a sense of loneliness deeper than he had ever felt before, he went down on his knees to beg the company of God whose existence he had so often defended as if it were in danger from his creatures, but whom he had so little regarded as actually existent that he had not yet sought refuge with him. All the house was asleep—the major had long ended his prayers and was slumbering by the fire—when Raymount knelt before the living source of his life, and rose from his knees a humbler man.

—Forty-One —

A Sad Beginning

Toward morning Gerald Raymount went to bed and slept late. Alas, when he woke the old feeling had returned! How could he forgive the son that had so disgraced him!

Instead of going once again to the living strength, he began to try to persuade himself on philosophical grounds that the best thing would be to forgive his son, that it was the part of the wise man to abstain from harshness. But he had little success with himself. Anger and pride were too much for him. His breakfast was taken to him in the study, and there Hester found him an hour later, his food still untouched. He submitted to her embrace, but scarcely spoke and asked nothing about Corney. Hester felt sadly chilled and hopeless.

But she had begun to learn that one of the principal parts of faith is patience, and that the setting of wrong things right is so far from easy that not even God does it all at once. Time is nothing to him who sees the end from the beginning. He does not grudge thousands of years of labor. The things he cares to do for us require our co-operation, and that makes the great difficulty—we are such poor fellow-workers with him! All that seems to deny his presence and labour only, necessitates a larger theory of that presence and labour. Yet time lies heavy on the young especially, and Hester left the room with a heavy heart.

The only way in such stubbornnesses of the spirit, when we cannot feel that we are wrong, is to open our hearts, in silence and loneliness and prayer, to the influences from above—stronger for the right than any for the wrong, to seek the sweet enablings of the living light to see things as they are—as God sees them, who never is wrong because he has no selfishness. To rise humbly glorious above our low self, to choose the yet infant self that is one with Christ, who sought never his own but the things of his father and brother, is the redemption begun, and the inheritance will follow.

Mr. Raymount, like most of us, was a long way indeed from this yet. He strove hard to reconcile the memories of the night with the feelings of the morning—strove to realize a state of mind in which a measure of forgiveness to his son blended with a measure of satisfaction to the wounded pride he called paternal dignity.