I have done my best for you! If you think you have found a
better teacher, no warning, I fear, will any longer avail!"

"If I did think I had found a better teacher, no warning certainly
would; I am only afraid I have not. But of one thing I am sure--that
the things Mr. Grant teaches are much more to be desired than--"

"By the unsanctified heart, no doubt!" said Sophia.

"The unsanctified heart," rejoined Arctura, astonished at her own
boldness, and the sense of power and freedom growing in her as she
spoke, "surely needs God as much as the sanctified! But can the heart
be altogether unsanctified that desires to find God so beautiful and
good that it can worship him with its whole power of love and
adoration? Or is God less beautiful and good than that?"

"We ought to worship God whatever he is."

"But could we love him with all our hearts if he were not altogether
lovable?"

"He might not be the less to be worshipped though he seemed so to us.
We must worship his justice as much as his love, his power as much as
his justice."

Arctura returned no answer; the words had fallen on her heart like an
ice-berg. She was not, however, so utterly overwhelmed by them as she
would have been some time before; she thought with herself, "I will ask
Mr. Grant! I am sure he does not think like that! Worship power as much
as love! I begin to think she does not understand what she is talking
about! If I were to make a creature needing all my love to make life
endurable to him, and then not be kind enough to him, should I not be
cruel? Would I not be to blame? Can God be God and do anything
conceivably to blame--anything that is not altogether beautiful? She
tells me we cannot judge what it would be right for God to do by what
it would be right for us to do: if what seems right to me is not right
to God, I must wrong my conscience and be a sinner in order to serve
him! Then my conscience is not the voice of God in me! How then am I
made in his image? What does it mean? Ah, but that image has been
defaced by the fall! So I cannot tell a bit what God is like? Then how
am I to love him? I never can love him! I am very miserable! I am not
God's child!

Thus, long after Miss Carmichael had taken a coldly sorrowful farewell
of her, Arctura went round and round the old mill-horse rack of her
self-questioning: God was not to be trusted in until she had done
something she could not do, upon which he would take her into his
favour, and