ling, and one must
be a great philosopher to have got quite clear of all that, and to have
emerged into the serene air of pure intellect, in which it is evident
that individuals really exist for no other purpose than that abstractions
may be drawn from them--abstractions that may rise from heaps of ruined
lives like the sweet savour of a sacrifice in the nostrils of
philosophers, and of a philosophic Deity. And so it comes to pass that
for the man who knows sympathy because he has known sorrow, that old, old
saying about the joy of angels over the repentant sinner outweighing
their joy over the ninety-nine just, has a meaning which does not jar
with the language of his own heart. It only tells him, that for angels
too there is a transcendent value in human pain, which refuses to be
settled by equations; that the eyes of angels too are turned away from
the serene happiness of the righteous to bend with yearning pity on the
poor erring soul wandering in the desert where no water is: that for
angels too the misery of one casts so tremendous a shadow as to eclipse
the bliss of ninety-nine.

Mr. Tryan had gone through the initiation of suffering: it is no wonder,
then, that Janet's restoration was the work that lay nearest his heart;
and that, weary as he was in body when he entered the vestry after the
evening service, he was impatient to fulfil the promise of seeing her.
His experience enabled him to divine--what was the fact--that the
hopefulness of the morning would be followed by a return of depression
and discouragement; and his sense of the inward and outward difficulties
in the way of her restoration was so keen, that he could only find relief
from the foreboding it excited by lifting up his heart in prayer. There
are unseen elements which often frustrate our wisest calculations--which
raise up the sufferer from the edge of the grave, contradicting the
prophecies of the clear-sighted physician, and fulfilling the blind
clinging hopes of affection; such unseen elements Mr. Tryan called the
Divine Will, and filled up the margin of ignorance which surrounds all
our knowledge with the feelings of trust and resignation. Perhaps the
profoundest philosophy could hardly fill it up better.

His mind was occupied in this way as he was absently taking off his gown,
when Mr. Landor startled him by entering the vestry and asking abruptly,
'Have you heard the news about Dempster?'

'No,' said Mr. Tryan, anxiously; 'what is it?'