es all
things had become new; after a little while he did try to tell her, and
although the words were lame, and apparently contradictory to much that
they both knew was also true, still some small measure of his meaning
passed into her mind.

"God is different from what I ever thought," he said; "He isn't in some
things and not in others; it's wicked to live so as to make people think
that, for they think they can get outside of Him, and then they don't
mind Him at all."

"How do you know it?" she asked curiously.

"I saw it. Perhaps God showed me because I was so hard up. It's God's
truth, Ann, that I am saying."

The room was quite dark again now; the chirping of the crickets outside
thrilled through and through it, as if there were no walls there but
only the darkness and the chirping. Ann sat upon a wooden chair by the
stove.

She considered for a minute, and then she said, with the first touch of
repentance in her heart: "Well, I reckon God ain't in me, any way. There
isn't much of God in me that I can see."

"I'll tell you how it is if I can." Toyner's voice had a strange rest
and calm in it. He spoke as a man who looked at some inward source of
peace, trying to describe it. "Supposing you had a child, you wouldn't
care anything about him at all if you could just work him by wires so
that he couldn't do anything but just what you liked; and yet the more
you cared about him, the more it would hurt you dreadfully if he didn't
do the things that you knew were good for him, and love you and talk to
you too. Well now, suppose one day, when he was a little fellow, say,
he wanted to touch something hot, and you told him not to. Well, if he
gave it up, you'd make it easier for him to be good next time; but
suppose he went on determined to have his own way, can't you think of
yourself taking hold of his hand and just helping him to reach up and
touch the hot thing? I tell you, if you did that it would mean that you
cared a great sight more about him than if you just slapped him and put
it out of his reach; and yet, you see, you'd be helping him to do the
wrong thing just because you wanted to take the naughtiness out of his
heart, not because you were a devil that wanted him to be naughty. Well,
you see, between us and our children" (Toyner was talking as men do who
get hold of truth, not as an individual, but as mankind) "it's not the
same as between God and us. They have our life in them, but they're
outside us