trouble you. But when I read them over now, they seemed to me so lovely
that I could hardly read them aloud. I can recall the fact that they
troubled me, but the mode of the fact I scarcely can recall. I can hardly
see now wherein lay the hurt or offence the words gave me. And why is that?
Simply because I understand them now, and I did not understand them then.
I took them as uttered with a tone of reproof; now I hear them as uttered
with a tone of loving surprise. But really I cannot feel sure what it was
that I did not like. And I am confident it is so with a great many things
that we reject. We reject them simply because we do not understand them.
Therefore, indeed, we cannot with truth be said to reject them at all. It
is some false appearance that we reject. Some of the grandest things in
the whole realm of truth look repellent to us, and we turn away from them,
simply because we are not--to use a familiar phrase--we are not up to them.
They appear to us, therefore, to be what they are not. Instruction sounds
to the proud man like reproof; illumination comes on the vain man like
scorn; the manifestation of a higher condition of motive and action
than his own, falls on the self-esteeming like condemnation; but it is
consciousness and conscience working together that produce this impression;
the result is from the man himself, not from the higher source. From the
truth comes the power, but the shape it assumes to the man is from the man
himself."

"You are quite beyond me now, papa," said Wynnie.

"Well, my dear," I answered, "I will return to the words of the boy Jesus,
instead of talking more about them; and when I have shown you what they
mean, I think you will allow that that feeling you have about them is all
and altogether an illusion."

"There is one thing first," said Connie, "that I want to understand. You