down. Palmer was a doubter, an infidel. What this meant to the girl, we
cannot tell; her religion was not ours. People build their faith on
Christ, as a rock,--a factitious aid. She found Him in her life, long
ago, when she was a child, and her soul grew out from Him. He was a
living Jesus to her, not a dead one. That was why she had a healthy
soul. Pain was keener to her than to us; the filth, injustice, bafflings
in the world,--they hurt her; she never glossed them over as
"necessity," or shirked them as we do: she cried hot, weak tears, for
instance, over the wrongs of the slaves about her, her old father's
ignorance, her own cramped life; but she never said for these things,
"Does God still live?" She saw, close to the earth, the atmosphere of
the completed work, the next step upward,--the kingdom of that Jesus;
the world lay in it, swathed in bands of pain and wrong and effort,
growing, unconscious, to perfected humanity. She had faith in the
Recompense, she thought faith would bring it right down into earth, and
she tried to do it in a practical way. She did do it: a curious fact for
your theology, which I go out of the way of the story to give you,--a
peculiar power belonging to this hot-tempered girl,--an anomaly in
psychology, but you will find it in the lives of Jung Stilling and St.
John. This was it: she and the people about her needed many things,
temporal and spiritual: her Christ being alive, and not a dead sacrifice
and example alone, whatever was needed she asked for, and it was always
given her. _Always_. I say it in the full strength of meaning. I wish
every human soul could understand the lesson; not many preachers would
dare to teach it to them. It was a commonplace matter with her.

Now do you see what it cost her to know that Palmer was an infidel?
Could she marry him? Was it a sin to love him? And yet, could _she_
enter heaven, he left out? The soul of the girl that God claimed, and
the Devil was scheming for, had taken up this fiery trial, and fought