"I am not sure that I realize this love of His of which you speak," I said sadly. "It is so vague and vast that I become lost, and feel that I have no personal hold upon it. How can He love the whole world, and yet love each separate individual in it with an affection as distinct as that which I feel for my wife and children?" "You cannot realize it as existing in yourself," she made answer, "although even you love all your children, and yet love each one of them with a distinct and personal love; but then you cannot order the succession of the seasons, or stay a planet upon its course, and you might just as well try to measure God's power by your power, as try to apprehend the love which passeth understanding by likening it to your own. But you will know what Christ is to us one day." "Tell me more of Him," I whispered eagerly; "tell me more of Him. Did you love Him as earnestly and believe in Him as trustfully when you were on earth as you do now?" "Not always," she answered sadly, "not always (and, oh! it was such 'cold comfort'--the talk of the Pantheists and the Deists to whom I had gone), but I came at last to see that the Cross of Christ is humanity's only hope. I came, too, to think that I could better bear to disbelieve in a God at all than to disbelieve in the Saviour. 'By Atheism,' I said to myself, 'I lose only a Deity of whom (excepting for the gospel-revelation) I know practically nothing, but in losing Christ I lose all--this world's hope as well as the next's.' There is not a creed which has been offered us during the last eighteen hundred years as a substitute for faith in the Saviour which does not take the very basis of its being from Christianity." "Yes," I said; "but many people will tell you that Christianity is nothing more than a skilfully-framed fable, cunningly devised to adapt itself to our human needs." "Christ was, and Christianity was before humanity or its needs came into being," she made answer; "and the sacrifice of the Cross was no afterthought given as a concession to our human requirements. On the contrary, our human requirements were given us that we, through them, might come by way of Calvary to the feet of Christ; and it is because it has been God's purpose from all eternity to save the sinner by the sacrifice of Himself that you and I feel our need of a Saviour." "Yes," I said, "I do indeed feel that whatever help comes to me must be something outside myself, and that no sorrowing of mine can atone for the past; but I feel also that I, and I only, am responsible for what I have done, and that to lay that responsibility upon another is utterly inadequate to satisfy even my limited sense of justice--besides which I never can and never will believe in the possibility of the innocent being allowed to suffer for the guilty."