ng
school-girls; and when they passed on into the dining-room, he spilt
out of the house, and ran home to the furniture-shop and his books.

When the ladies took their leave, Gibbie walked with them. And now
at last he learned where to find Ginevra.

CHAPTER XLVII.

A LESSON OF WISDOM.

In obedience to the suggestion of his wife, Mr. Sclater did what he
could to show Sir Gilbert how mistaken he was in imagining he could
fit his actions to the words of our Lord. Shocked as even he would
probably have been at such a characterization of his attempt, it
amounted practically to this: Do not waste your powers in the
endeavour to keep the commandments of our Lord, for it cannot be
done, and he knew it could not be done, and never meant it should be
done. He pointed out to him, not altogether unfairly, the
difficulties, and the causes of mistake, with regard to his words;
but said nothing to reveal the spirit and the life of them. Showing
more of them to be figures than at first appeared, he made out the
meanings of them to be less, not more than the figures, his pictures
to be greater than their subjects, his parables larger and more
lovely than the truths they represented. In the whole of his
lecture, through which ran from beginning to end a tone of reproof,
there was not one flash of enthusiasm for our Lord, not a sign that,
to his so-called minister, he was a refuge, or a delight--that he
who is the joy of his Father's heart, the essential bliss of the
universe, was anything to the soul of his creature, who besides had
taken upon him to preach his good news, more than a name to call
himself by--that the story of the Son of God was to him anything
better than the soap and water wherewith to blow theological bubbles
with the tobacco-pipe of his speculative understanding. The
tendency of it was simply to the quelling of all true effort after
the knowing of him through obedience, the quenching of all devotion
to the central good. Doubtless Gibbie, as well as many a wiser man,
might now and then make a mistake in the embodiment of his
obedience, but even where the action misses the command, it may yet
be obedience to him who gave the command, and by obeying one learns
how to obey. I hardly know, however, where Gibbie blundered, except
it was in failing to recognize the animals before whom he ought not
to cast his pearls--in taking it for granted that, because his
guardian was a minister, and his wife a mini