"When you do it, then you will feel you are doing it."

"I know you are coming to something, papa. Please make haste, for my back
is getting so bad."

"I've tired you, my pet. It was very thoughtless of me. I will tell you the
rest another time," I said, rising.

"No, no. It will make me much worse not to hear it all now."

"Well, I will tell you. Be still, my darling, I won't be long. In the time
of the old sacrifices, when God so kindly told his ignorant children to
do something for him in that way, poor people were told to bring, not a
bullock or a sheep, for that was more than they could get, but a pair of
turtledoves, or two young pigeons. But now, as Crashaw the poet says,
'Ourselves become our own best sacrifice.' God wanted to teach people to
offer themselves. Now, you are poor, my pet, and you cannot offer yourself
in great things done for your fellow-men, which was the way Jesus did.
But you must remember that the two young pigeons of the poor were just as
acceptable to God as the fat bullock of the rich. Therefore you must say to
God something like this:--'O heavenly Father, I have nothing to offer
thee but my patience. I will bear thy will, and so offer my will a
burnt-offering unto thee. I will be as useless as thou pleasest.' Depend
upon it, my darling, in the midst of all the science about the world and
its ways, and all the ignorance of God and his greatness, the man or woman
who can thus say, _Thy will be done_, with the true heart of giving up is
nearer the secret of things than the geologist and theologian. And now, my
darling, be quiet in God's name."