no_ in a multitude of words--at least to his
own daughter: he was not so sure of God as he was of that daughter, with
those eyes looking straight into his! Could it be that he never had
believed in God at all? The thought went through him with a great pang.
It was as if the moon grew dark above him, and the earth withered under
his feet. He stood before his child like one whose hypocrisy had been
proclaimed from the housetop.

"Are you vexed with me, father?" said Dorothy sadly.

"No, my child," answered the minister, in a voice of unnatural
composure. "But you stand before me there like, the very thought started
out of my soul, alive and visible, to question its own origin."

"Ah, father!" cried Dorothy, "let us question our origin."

The minister never even heard the words.

"That very doubt, embodied there in my child, has, I now know, been
haunting me, dogging me behind, ever since I began to teach others," he
said, as if talking in his sleep. "Now it looks me in the face. Am I
myself to be a castaway?--Dorothy, I am _not_ sure of God--not as I am
sure of you, my darling."

He stood silent. His ear expected a low-voiced, sorrowful reply. He
started at the tone of gladness in which Dorothy cried--

"Then, father, there is henceforth no cloud between us, for we are in
the same cloud together! It does not divide us, it only brings us closer
to each other. Help me, father: I am trying hard to find God. At the
same time, I confess I would rather not find Him, than find Him such as
I have sometimes heard you represent Him."

"It may well be," returned her father--the _ex-cathedral_, the
professional tone had vanished utterly for the time, and he spoke with
the voice of an humble, true man--"it may well be that I have done Him
wrong; for since now at my age I am compelled to allow that I am not
sure of Him, what more likely than that I may have been cherishing wrong
ideas concerning Him, and so not looking in the right direction for
finding Him?"

"Where did you get your notions of God, father--those, I mean, that you
took with you to the pulpit?"

A year ago even, if he had been asked the same question, he would at
once have answered, "From the Word of God;" but now he hesitated, and
minutes passed before he began a reply. For he saw now that it was not
from the Bible _he_ had gathered them, whence soever they had come at
first. He pondered and searched--and found that the real answer eluded
him, hiding itself