’But, oh, daddy! He isn’t _my_ Shepherd Beautiful, I can’t find His love; I can only see some one who has been very cruel to me.’ And father put his arm round me as he used to do when I was little and frightened in the woods, and the evening sun streamed down upon his face, and deepened the aloof look that he wore, and he gazed out over the fields of lilies that were tinted now with gold and rose. ’Yet, it is He who clothes the woods you love so every spring, my darling.’ And as I looked at all the colour and the harmony, the flowers, the sunlight, and the dappled shade, the woods soothed and quietened me. And the old ’washed’ feeling came, and the rebellion went, and a great longing to understand God’s ways came in my heart instead. ’Oh, but the world’s pain, father, and all the grief brought by the war.’ ’God calls the world that way sometimes, Meg.’ ’But does He never call except through pain?’ ’Some very perfect souls can feel Him "in the summer air or in dewy garden green," or in the song of birds, but to many it is only "when the sharp strokes flesh and heart run through, in all their incommunicable pain"—God speaks Himself.’ ’And does He always call when He sends pain, father?’ ’It has so large a place in God’s economy, my darling, that we may find in it another Sacrament. When the Great High Priest gives the bread of tears, the wine of separation, there is, in these visible things, His inward call to come closer to Himself. Oh, little daughter, when you can find His love in nothing else, look at Calvary, for there the perfect Saviour deigned to stoop to a last service—"Love’s epitome."’ And so I ’looked’ at Him upon His cross, as daddy bade me, and realised for the first time that as God’s justice has been satisfied, there is nothing left but His love for me. I saw, all in a moment, that if God loved me enough to give His Son, and if His Son loved me enough to give His life, He will not keep back any other gift. He is all love, so all He sends to me is Love. He cannot help Himself. I am all broken up to think that I so nearly missed a gift of love because He sent it veiled to me in pain. Out in the Hickley Woods I found Him. Down the paths of my life I suddenly saw the way of His feet, and my soul rushed out to meet Him. At last I know the lesson that Ross learned by pain. I see what Charlie saw only when he was blind. I understand what father has known since mother died. Oh, the wonder and the utter perfection of this ’experience.’ It links me up with all the others down the centuries who having found _Him_ ’in a mist of tears’ can _glory_ in their pain. If only I could pass the lovely comfort of it on to some of those whose hearts are wounded, as mine is, inexpressibly and beyond all telling, by this awful war:—