fore, but with
dawning promise of a new creation, a fresh beauty, in welcoming which
he was not turning from the old, but receiving the new that God sent
him. He might yet be many a time sad, but to lament would be to act as
if he were wronged--would be at best weak and foolish! He would look
the new life in the face, and be what it should please God to make him.
The scents the wind brought him from field and garden and moor, seemed
sweeter than ever wind-borne scents before: they were seeking to
comfort him! He sighed--but turned from the sigh to God, and found
fresh gladness and welcome. The wind hovered about him as if it would
fain have something to do in the matter; the river rippled and shone as
if it knew something worth knowing as yet unrevealed. The delight of
creation is verily in secrets, but in secrets as truths on the way.
All secrets are embryo revelations. On the far horizon heaven and
earth met as old friends, who, though never parted, were ever renewing
their friendship. The world, like the angels, was rejoicing--if not
over a sinner that had repented, yet over a man that had passed from a
lower to a higher condition of life--out of its earth into its air: he
was going to live above, and look down on the inferior world! Ere the
shades of evening fell that day around Donal Grant, he was in the new
childhood of a new world.

I do not mean such thoughts had never been present to him before; but
to think a thing is only to look at it in a glass; to know it as God
would have us know it, and as we must know it to live, is to see it as
we see love in a friend's eyes--to have it as the love the friend sees
in ours. To make things real to us, is the end and the battle-cause of
life. We often think we believe what we are only presenting to our
imaginations. The least thing can overthrow that kind of faith. The
imagination is an endless help towards faith, but it is no more faith
than a dream of food will make us strong for the next day's work. To
know God as the beginning and end, the root and cause, the giver, the
enabler, the love and joy and perfect good, the present one existence
in all things and degrees and conditions, is life; and faith, in its
simplest, truest, mightiest form is--to do his will.

Donal was making his way towards the eastern coast, in the certain hope
of finding work of one kind or another. He could have been well
content to pass his life as a shepherd like his father but for