his horizon ever and anon rose the glimmer of a great aurora, or the
glimpse of a boundless main--if only he could have been sure they
were no mirage of his own parched heart and hungry eye--that they
were thoughts in the mind of the Eternal, and THRERFORE had appeared
in his, even as the Word was said to have become flesh and dwelt
with men! The next moment he would be gasping in that malarious
exhalation from the marshes of his neglected heart--the
counter-fear, namely, that the word under whose potent radiance the
world seemed on the verge of budding forth and blossoming as the
rose, was TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.

"Yes, much too good, if there be no living, self-willing Good," said
Polwarth one evening, in answer to the phrase just dropped from his
lips. "But if there be such a God as alone could be God, can
anything be too good to be true?--too good for such a God as
contented Jesus Christ?"

At one moment he was ready to believe everything, even to that
strangest, yet to me right credible miracle of the fish and the
piece of money, and the next to doubt whether man had ever dared
utter the words, "I and the Father are one." Tossed he was and
tormented in spirit, calling even aloud sometimes to know if there
was a God anywhere hearing his prayer, sure only of this, that
whatever else any being might be, if he heard not prayer, he could
not be the God for whom his soul cried and fainted. Sometimes there
came to him, it is true, what he would gladly have taken for an
answer, but it was nothing more than the sudden descent of a kind of
calmness on his spirit, which, for aught he could tell, might be but
the calm of exhaustion. His knees were sore with kneeling, his face
white with thinking, his eyes dim with trouble; for when once a man