ore or less satisfied for the time. The grown-up people
are very wise, and they say it was kind of God to make hell, and very
loving of Him to send men there; and besides, he couldn't help Himself,
and they are very wise, we think, so we believe them--more or less.

IV.

Then a new time comes, of which the leading feature is, that the shrewd
questions are asked louder. We carry them to the grown-up people; they
answer us, and we are not satisfied.

And now between us and the dear old world of the senses the spirit-world
begins to peep in, and wholly clouds it over. What are the flowers to
us? They are fuel waiting for the great burning. We look at the walls
of the farmhouse and the matter-of-fact sheep-kraals, with the merry
sunshine playing over all; and do not see it. But we see a great white
throne, and him that sits on it. Around Him stand a great multitude that
no man can number, harpers harping with their harps, a thousand times
ten thousand, and thousands of thousands. How white are their robes,
washed in the blood of the Lamb! And the music rises higher, and rends
the vault of heaven with its unutterable sweetness. And we, as we
listen, ever and anon, as it sinks on the sweetest, lowest note, hear a
groan of the damned from below. We shudder in the sunlight.

"The torment," says Jeremy Taylor, whose sermons our father reads aloud
in the evening, "comprises as many torments as the body of man has
joints, sinews, arteries, etc., being caused by that penetrating and
real fire of which this temporal fire is but a painted fire. What
comparison will there be between burning for a hundred years' space and
to be burning without intermission as long as God is God!"

We remember the sermon there in the sunlight. One comes and asks why we
sit there nodding so moodily. Ah, they do not see what we see.

"A moment's time, a narrow space,
Divides me from that heavenly place,
Or shuts me up in hell."

So says Wesley's hymn, which we sing evening by evening. What matter
sunshine and walls, men and sheep?

"The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not
seen are eternal." They are real.

The Bible we bear always in our breast; its pages are our food; we learn
to repeat it; we weep much, for in sunshine and in shade, in the early
morning or the late evening, in the field or in the house, the devil
walks with us. He comes to a real person, copper-coloured face, head a
little on on