his thought; he had this power over my understanding. He was my master
from the first.

He laid his hand now slightly upon my arm, as though to emphasise what
he said.

"It is a little hard to explain it reverently," he said, "and still
harder to understand why the difficulty should have come about, but in
our day it would seem that the nights of prayer and the fresh intuition
into the laws of God's working, which we see united in the life of our
great Example, have become divorced. It is their union again that we
must have--that we shall have; but at present there is the difficulty
for every man of us--the men who lead us in either path are different
men and lead different ways. Our law-givers are not the men who meet God
upon the mount. Our scientists are not the teachers who are pre-eminent
for fasting and prayer. We who to be true to ourselves must follow in
both paths find our souls perplexed."

In front of us, as we turned a curve in the drive, a bed of scarlet
lilies stood stately in the sun, and a pair of bickering sparrows rose
from the fountain near which they grew. Toyner made a slight gesture of
his hand. With the eagerness of a child he asked:

"Is it not hard to believe that we may ask and expect forgiveness and
gifts from the God who by slow inevitable laws of growth clothes the
lilies, who ordains the fall of every one of these sparrows, foresees
the fall and ordains it--the God whose character is expressed in
physical law? The texts of Jesus have become so trite that we forget
that they contain the same vision of 'God's mind in all things' that
makes it so hard to believe in a personality in God, that makes prayer