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.

How could he take his son to his bosom as he was? he asked—but did not ask how he was to draw him to repentance! He did not think of the tender entreaty with which, by the mouths of his prophets, God pleads with his people to come back to him. If the father, instead of holding out his arms to the child he would entice to his bosom, folds them on that bosom and turns his back—expectant it may be, but giving no sign of expectancy, the child will hardly suppose him longing to be reconciled. No doubt there are times when and children with whom any show of affection is not only useless but injurious, tending merely to increase their self-importance. In such case the child should not see the parent at all. But it was the opposite reason that made it better Cornelius should not yet see his father—he would have treated him so that he would only have hated him.