January 6, Epiphany. Went to the Church service. The thought that Christ truly came to us, to all the world, through His birth at Bethlehem, and the joy of His coming, is a blessing that everybody may share, and that it is more truly a blessing because it is to be shared, was chiefly dwelt upon. It struck me as a new thought, that the Wise Men from the East represented all the science, all the intellectual treasure of all time, which are truly given to humanity only when laid at the feet of Christ. The preacher did not express that idea, but it passed through my mind as I listened. Every gift we have, every work we do, only becomes a real, living, worthy thing, when given to Christ to be inspired with His life. If the scientific research of this age could but see the star hanging over the place where the Young Child lies, and find its true illumination in Him! January 7. Miss H---- called, full of enthusiasm over what she believes herself to have done by healing the sick, through the power of prayer. I must believe that what she says is true,--and yet I question. Can this be God’s way? Not impossible--but I have never been able to see that any prayer for definite physical results was so good as that which asks to be brought into harmony with the will of God, so that we shall accept any condition which He sees best for us. Yet--what does the “gift of healing” mean--if not that He permits health to flow through one life into another? My little crippled friend, E----, does not feel sure that she ought to ask God to make her well and strong, like other girls. I wish she might be, though. January 8. Miss E. H. called. Our talk always gets back to the one subject,--Christ in human life. She cannot see that He is more than the best of all human helpers, and yet she has flashes of higher truth sometimes. I think she wishes for a definite intellectual idea of the Christ, for she said to me, “You make it wholly spiritual,”--and so the conception of him, in the human soul, must be, it seems to me. She said, “I think of what He was,” and I think of Him, that He is, and there we parted. It is to me like the sunlight: clear, penetrating, inspiring, the idea of Christ who is, was, and is to be, the Eternal Son of the Father, the presence of God in humanity, as the friend of every soul,--the uniting link between the human and the divine. I feel my own personal immortality in following this truth whithersoever it may lead,--deeper, ever deeper, into the Heart of God, as I earnestly believe. At church the subject was the power behind all human efforts, which makes them worth anything. The planter and the waterer are nothing, except as means bringing the seed to growth, which must first be alive, a force in itself, which he who tends cannot produce or understand. The power of God behind all worthy human efforts, that we are tools in the Master’s hand, and must refer every good result to Him, were the inferences.