s peculiar beauty of holiness; but that
beauty is the expression of its essential truth, and the essence itself
is so strong that it bestows upon its embodiment even the power of
partial metamorphosis with all other vital relations. How many daughters
have in the devotion of their tenderness, become as mothers to their own
fathers! Who has not known some sister more of a wife to a man than she
for whose sake he neglected her? But it will take the loves of all the
relations of life gathered in one, to shadow the love which, in the
kingdom of heaven, is recognized as due to each from each human being
_per se_. It is for the sake of the essential human, that all human
relations and all forms of them exist--that we may learn what it is, and
become capable of loving it aright.

Dorothy would now have been as a mother to her father, had she had but a
good hope, if no more, of finding her Father in heaven. She was not at
peace enough to mother any body. She had indeed a grasp of the skirt of
His robe--only she could not be sure it was not the mere fringe of a
cloud she held. Not the less was her father all her care, and pride, and
joy. Of his faults she saw none: there was enough of the noble and
generous in him to hide them from a less partial beholder than a
daughter. They had never been serious in comparison with his virtues. I
do not mean that every fault is not so serious that a man must be
willing to die twenty deaths to get rid of it; but that, relatively to
the getting rid of it, a fault is serious or not, in proportion to the
depth of its root, rather than the amount of its foliage. Neither can
that be the worst-conditioned fault, the man's own suspicion of which
would make him hang his head in shame; those are his worst faults which
a man will start up to defend; those are the most dangerous moral
diseases whose symptoms are regarded as the signs of health.

Like lovers they walked out together, with eyes only for each other, for
the good news had made them shy--through the lane, into the cross
street, and out into Pine street, along which they went westward,
meeting the gaze of the low sun, which wrapped them round in a veil of
light and dark, for the light made their eyes dark, so that they seemed
feeling their way out of the light into the shadow.

"This is like life," said the pastor, looking down at the precious face
beside him: "our eyes can best see from under the shadow of
afflictions."

"I would rather i