t of
his own wisdom, a fifth in his daily routine, and we have all learned
it more or less ill. For should I ask you who hear me now, you would
all reply thoughtlessly, and just because I ask you from this place,
'Faith is first.'

"No, in very truth, it is not. Watch over your child, as it struggles
for breath on the outermost verge of life, or see your wife follow the
child to that outermost verge, beside herself for anxiety and
sleeplessness,--then love will teach you that _life comes first_. And
never from this day on will I seek God or God's will in any form of
words, in any sacrament, or in any book or any place, as if He were
first and foremost to be found there; no, life is first and
foremost--life as we win it from the depths of despair, in the victory
of the light, in the grace of self-devotion, in our intercourse with
living human kind. God's supreme word to us is life, our highest
worship of Him is love for the living. This lesson, self-evident as it
is, was needed by me more than by most others. This it is that in
various ways and upon many grounds I have hitherto rejected,--and of
late most of all. But never more shall words be the highest for me,
nor symbols, but the eternal revelation of life. Never more will I
freeze fast in doctrine, but let the warmth of life melt my will.
Never will I condemn men by the dogmas of old time justice, unless they
fit with our own time's gospel of love. Never, for God's sake! And
this because I believe in Him, the God of Life, and His never ending
revelation in life itself."

Here is a gospel, indeed, one that needs no church for its
promulgation, and no ceremonial for the enhancement of its
impressiveness. It is a gospel, moreover, that is based upon no
foundation of precarious logic, but finds its premises in the healthy
instincts of the natural man. It is no small thing to have thus found
the way, and to have helped others likewise to find the way, out of the
mists of superstition, through the valleys of doubt and despondency,
athwart the thickets of prejudice and bigotry with all their furtive
foemen, up to these sunlit heights of serenity.

"Mary" is less explicit in its teaching than the two great novels just
summarized, but what it misses in didacticism it more than gains in
art. The radiant creature who gives her name to the book is one of
Bjoernson's most exquisite figures. She is the very embodiment of
youthful womanhood, filled with the joy of l