God at all, He is far away. He is great beyond our dreaming--distant
beyond our dreaming. If there be a scheme in the universe, there is at
least no care for the atoms which compose it. God sits far withdrawn,
beyond our prayers, beyond our tears and fears. This fretful insect
of an hour, who cannot even measure the terms he uses, speaks of
the Eternal, the Immutable, and strives by his prayers to change Its
purposes. I am writing now by lamplight, and the agonies of the singed
moths whose little bodies encrust my lamp-glass do not move me from my
purpose. I realize their anguish at this moment with a deep pity, but
I do not stay to save them. My heavier purpose will not wait for them.
Thus I dreamed it was, likening smallest things to the greatest, with
God.

'At my father's death a change began to work in my opinions. I had
convinced myself that this life was all that man enjoyed or suffered,
but I began to be conscious that I was under tutelage. I began--at first
faintly and with much doubting--to think that my father's spirit and my
own were in communion. I knew that he had loved me fondly, and to me he
had always seemed a pattern of what is admirable in man. Now he seemed
greater, wiser, milder. I grew to believe that he had survived the
grave, and that he had found permission to be my guide and guardian. The
creed which slowly grew up in my mind and heart, and is now fixed there,
was simply this: that as a great Emperor rules his many provinces, God
rules the universe, employing many officers--intelligences of loftiest
estate, then intelligences less lofty; less lofty still beneath these,
and at the last the humbler servants, who are still as gods to us, but
within our reach, and His messengers and agents. Then God seemed no
longer utterly remote and impossible to belief, and I believed. And
whether this be true or false, I know one thing: this faith has made me
a better man than I should have been without it My beloved father, wise
and kind, has seemed to lead me by the hand. I have not dared in the
knowledge of his sleepless love to do many things to which I have been
tempted. I have learned from him to know--if I know anything--that
life from its lowest form is a striving upward through uncounted and
innumerable grades, and that in each grade something is learned that
fits us for the next, or something lost which has to be won back again
after a great purgation of pain and repentance.

'It is three days sinc