“Such things do not happen nowadays,” he went on. “That form of persecution is over. Instead of it, we have seen the dawning of what may be a darker day, when those who profess the faith of Christ have themselves turned to persecute the faith which is in their hearts. Faith--the word means to me that trust in God’s plans for us which brings confidence to the soul even when we stand in horrible fear of life, and mental peace even when we are facing that which we cannot understand. We persecute our faith in many ingenious ways, but perhaps those torture themselves most whose religion is most emotional--those who are only sure that God is with them when they feel the peace of His presence in their hearts. A great divine said long ago that to love God thus is to love Him for the spiritual loaves and fishes, which He does not mean always to be our food. But for those who think that He is not with them when they are unaware of His presence so, I have this word: When you cannot find God in your hearts, then turn and look for Him in your lives. When you are soul-sick, discouraged, unhappy; when you feel neither joy nor peace, nor even the comfort of a dull satisfaction in earth; when life is nothing to you, and you wish for death, then ask yourself, What does God mean by this? For there is surely some lesson for you in that pain which you must learn before you leave it. You are not so young as to believe that you were meant for happiness. You know that you were made for discipline. And the discipline of life is the learning of the things _God wishes us to know_, even in hardest ways. But He is in the things we must learn, and in the ways we learn them. There is a marginal reading of the first chapter of the revised version of the Gospel of St. John which conveys my meaning: ‘That which hath been made was life in Him, and the life [or, as some commentators read, and I prefer it, simply _life_] was the light of men.’ That is, before Christ’s coming the light of men was in the experience to be gained in the lives He gave them. And it is still true. Not His life only, then, but your life and mine, which we know to the bitter-sweet depths, and whose lessons grow clearer and clearer before us, are to guide us. Life _is_ the light of men. I sometimes think that this, and this only, is rejecting Christ--to refuse to find Him in the life He gives us.” Serene heard no more. What else was said she did not know. She had seized upon his words, and was applying them to her own experiences with a fast-beating heart, to see if haply she had learned anything by them that “God wanted her to know.” She had loved unselfishly. Was not that something? She had learned that despair and distrust are not the attitudes in which loss may be safely met. She had become conscious in a blind way that the world was larger and nearer to her than it used to be, and she was coming to feel a sense of community in all human suffering. Were not all these good things?