n started.

"Mother, I bring you something that carries on your idea."

He went out, showed them his father's writing, and said that he would
read to them.

"Ah yes," exclaimed Manna; "it is good and kind of you to bring your
father here; how I would have liked to know him. Do you not believe
that he is now looking down upon us?"

Eric looked at his mother; he did not know what answer to give, and the
Mother said:--

"According to the ordinary conception of the word 'looking,' we cannot
conceive its being done without eyes. We have no conception how a
spirit exists, but there is not a day nor an hour that I do not live in
communion with my departed husband; he has come with me here, he will
remain with me wherever I go, till my last breath. But let me see--what
is it, Eric?"

"It has an odd title," answered the latter; "it treats of these things,
which I cannot explain, and which perhaps no one can explain."

"Read, I beg of you," entreated Manna.

Eric began to read:--

"Two things there are which stand firm, while the heart of man is
kept vacillating between defiance and despondency, haughtiness and
faint-heartedness; they are _nature_ and the _ideal within us_. The
church is also a strong-hold of the ideal, firm and secure; although
for me and many like me, it is not the only one.

"You say, nature does not help us. What help is she to me, when the
crushing conviction of imperfection, of perdition, of guilt comes upon
me and takes me captive? Well, nature does not speak; she simply
permits herself to be explained, understood; she gives back the echo of
what we call out to her. The church, on the contrary, speaks to us in
our individual griefs, she takes us up into the universal; that is the
great lesson of the expiatory suffering. We lay our grief aside when we
think of the great grief which the greatest of hearts took unto itself.

"And what is the third? you ask.

"A third is, nature and the ideal combined, which together elevate and
sustain us.

"What is the third? We call it art, we can also call it love, heroism.
In this view of mine, all philosophy also belongs to art. What the
genius of a man has created and fashioned out of himself as the
evidence of his existence, insight, and will, appears in art as visible
forms, looks down upon us in marble and in color, makes itself heard by
us in word and in melody, allows us to be conscious and to feel sure
that our fractional, half-expressed being has