a modern Elias would be wanted to herald its approach. Heaven would
bear her witness that she had never shrunk from the idea of martyrdom for
herself and Theobald, nor would she avoid it for her boy, if his life was
required of her in her Redeemer's service. Oh, no! If God told her to
offer up her first-born, as He had told Abraham, she would take him up to
Pigbury Beacon and plunge the--no, that she could not do, but it would be
unnecessary--some one else might do that. It was not for nothing that
Ernest had been baptised in water from the Jordan. It had not been her
doing, nor yet Theobald's. They had not sought it. When water from the
sacred stream was wanted for a sacred infant, the channel had been found
through which it was to flow from far Palestine over land and sea to the
door of the house where the child was lying. Why, it was a miracle! It
was! It was! She saw it all now. The Jordan had left its bed and
flowed into her own house. It was idle to say that this was not a
miracle. No miracle was effected without means of some kind; the
difference between the faithful and the unbeliever consisted in the very
fact that the former could see a miracle where the latter could not. The
Jews could see no miracle even in the raising of Lazarus and the feeding
of the five thousand. The John Pontifexes would see no miracle in this
matter of the water from the Jordan. The essence of a miracle lay not in
the fact that means had been dispensed with, but in the adoption of means
to a great end that had not been available without interference; and no
one would suppose that Dr Jones would have brought the water unless he
had been directed. She would tell this to Theobald, and get him to see
it in the . . . and yet perhaps it would be better not. The insight of
women upon matters of this sort was deeper and more unerring than that of
men. It was a woman and not a man who had been filled most completely
with the whole fulness of the Deity. But why had they not treasured up
the water after it was used? It ought never, never to have been thrown
away, but it had been. Perhaps, however, this was for the best too--they
might have been tempted to set too much store by it, and it might have
become a source of spiritual danger to them--perhaps even of spiritual
pride, the very sin of all others which she most abhorred. As for the
channel through which the Jordan had flowed to Battersby, that mattered
not more than the