might. I used to say,
'Doctrine first, and love afterwards,' to which she often said, 'No,
love is first!'

"Well, some time ago I had a sight of her; she had died, and entered
this world of ours. She was in a very different place from this, but she
thought of me without ceasing, and her desire prevailed. I saw her,
though I was hidden from her, and looked into her heart, and discerned
that the one thing which spoiled her joy was that I was parted from her.

"And after that I had no more delight in my security. I began to suffer
and to yearn. And then, little by little, I began to see that it is
love after all which binds us together, and which draws us to God; but
my difficulty is this, that I still believe that my faith is true; and
if that is true, then other faiths cannot be true also, and then I fall
into sad bewilderment and despair." He stopped and looked at me fixedly.

"But," I said, "if I may carry the thought further, might not all be
true? Two men may be very unlike each other in form and face and
thought--yet both are very man. It would be foolish arguing, if a man
were to say, 'I am indeed a man, and because my friend is unlike
me--taller, lighter-complexioned, swifter of thought--therefore he
cannot be a man.' Or, again, two men may travel by the same road, and
see many different things, yet it is the same road they have both
travelled; and one need not say to the other, 'You cannot have travelled
by the same road, because you did not see the violets on the bank under
the wood, or the spire that peeped through the trees at the folding of
the valleys--and therefore you are a liar and a deceiver!' If one
believes firmly in one's own faith, one need not therefore say that all
who do not hold it are perverse and wilful. There is no excuse, indeed,
for not holding to what we believe to be true, but there is no excuse
either for interfering with the sincere belief of another, unless one
can persuade him he is wrong. Is not the mistake to think that one holds
the truth in its entirety, and that one has no more to learn and to
perceive? I myself should welcome differences of faith, because it shows
me that faith is a larger thing even than I know. What another sees may
be but a thought that is hidden from me, because the truth may be seen
from a different angle. To complain that we cannot see it all is as
foolish as when the child is vexed because it cannot see the back of the
moon. And it seems to me that our