“Not immediately, for illness or wholeness is a matter of the consciousness, and that cannot be completely changed at once. It is all progression, growth, expansion, but it takes what you call time to effect it. There is plenty of work for you, Gabriel, here as well as there.” “I am glad of that,” said the unordained preacher. “An idle heaven would be hell for me. Man’s desire for action and his pleasure in it are strong evidence of his immortality. Were death--extinction--his destiny, somehow he would have known it, and would have been indolent instead of busy. It is true that much of his work is impermanent and useless or worse than useless; but it is the effort he puts forth, the exercise of will, that is the valuable part of it. That which he is really building through all his blundering and the only part of his work that endures, is character.” “Truth, Gabriel! You speak immortal truth,” Prescott wrote. “Now, good-night.” “Do you really believe you have been talking with Gordon Prescott?” Cartice asked. “Yes,” said Gabriel, simply. “I could not prove it to others; neither can I prove that a letter is from the person whose name is signed to it, without his personal affirmation, and even that is only valuable in proportion to his reputation for truth-telling. Most of what we call proofs of anything is flimsy and fallible.” “I want to tell you, Mr. Norris,” said Cartice, speaking with feeling, “that I owe you far more than you are aware of. You first gave me light, and you were a mascot for me, besides, in worldly success. Through meeting you the tide of my fortune, the day I met you, turned from ebb to flow. The drawing I made of you opened the door of opportunity for me. But giving me light was the greatest service. That day, in your lecture at the market house you told us we were not here simply to be happy; that happiness as we pictured it, was not the purpose of existence; that we were here to learn and to grow to the perfection nature intended, as a plant or a tree grows. In other words, we are to unfold from the seed and express our true being. Up to that time, like everybody else, I had made the hunt for happiness my chief aim. When, in consequence of that, I found myself swamped in misery, I considered myself injured, and felt sure somebody was to blame. I could not see that I, myself, was the culprit; that the selfish search for happiness must lead directly away from that condition. Ah, I suffered much, much up to that time; but I see the uses of it now. I was being educated by the only means possible. Had I secured the kind of happiness I was looking for, I should still be in darkness. It was the ideal of an undeveloped mind. Now I see plainly that the spiritual side of suffering is good. It means birth--the birth of knowledge, of light, of truth. I don’t think suffering is ‘sent upon us,’ as many good people assert. We pursue false ideals and they bring us to grief; but through that suffering we find the true ideals.