ful, can create or
allow to arise within Himself something that is not, Himself, alien to
Him, hostile to Him? How can we believe in Him and trust Him, if this
indeed be so?

And yet, looking upon that little flock to-day, I did indeed feel the
presence of a kind and fatherly heart, of something that grieved for my
pain, and that laid a hand upon my shoulder, saying, "Son, endure for a
little; be not so disquieted!"

March 8, 1891.

Something--far-off, faint, joyful--cried out suddenly in the depths of
my spirit to-day. I felt--I can but express it by images, for it was
too intangible for direct utterance--as a woman feels when her child's
life quickens within her; as a traveller's heart leaps up when, lost
among interminable hills, he is hailed by a friendly voice; as the
river-water, thrust up into creeks and estuaries by the incoming tide,
is suddenly freed by the ebb from that stealthy pressure, and flows
gladly downwards; as the dark garden-ground may feel when the frozen
soil melts under warm winds of spring, and the flower-roots begin to
swell and shoot.

Some such thrill it was that moved in the silence of the soul, showing
that the darkness was alive.

It came upon me as I walked among soft airs to-day. It was no bodily
lightness that moved me, for I was unstrung, listless, indolent; but it
was a sense that it was good to live, lonely and crushed as I was; that
there was something waiting for me which deserved to be approached with
a patient expectation--that life was enriched, rather than made
desolate by my grief and losses; that I had treasure laid up in heaven.
It came upon me as a fancy, but it was something better than that, that
one or other of my dear ones had perhaps awaked in the other world, and
had sent out a thought in search of me. I had often thought that if,
when we are born into this world of ours, our first years are so dumb
and unperceptive, it might be even so in the world beyond; that we are
there allowed to rest a little, to sleep; and that has seemed to me to
be perhaps the explanation why, in those first sad days of grief, when
the mourner aches to have some communication with the vanished soul,
and when the soul that has passed the bounds of life would be desiring
too, one would think, to send some message back, why, I say, there is
no voice nor hint nor sign. Perhaps the reason why our grief loses its
sting after a season is that the soul we have loved does contrive to
send