Christ loves you! The words thrilled through his soul with a strange, new power; he opened his eyes and looked astonished into the little earnest, pleading face. "Christ loves you," she repeated; "oh, do believe it!" "Loves _me_!" he said, slowly. "Why should he?" "But he does; he loves us all. He died for us. He died for you. Oh, believe it. He'll help you; he'll make you feel right. Only trust him. Please say you will!" Zeph looked at the little face earnestly, in a softened, wondering way. A tear slowly stole down his hard cheek. "Thank'e, dear child," he said. "You will believe it?" "I'll try." "You will trust Him?" Zeph paused a moment, then rose up with a new and different expression in his face, and said, in a subdued and earnest voice, "_I will_." "Amen!" said the Doctor, who stood listening; and he silently grasped the old man's hand. CHAPTER XXXI. THE JOY OF HARVEST. When Zeph turned from the little red school-house to go home, after the prayer-meeting, he felt that peace which comes after a great interior crisis has passed. He had, for the first time in his life, yielded his will, absolutely and thoroughly. He had humbled himself, in a public confession of wrong-doing, before all his neighbors, before those whom he had felt to be enemies. He had taken the step convulsively, unwillingly, constrained thereto by a mighty overmastering power which wrought within him. He had submitted, without love, to the simple, stern voice of conscience and authority--the submission of a subject to a monarch, not that of a child to a father. Just then and there, when he felt himself crushed, lonely, humbled and despairing, the touch of that child's hand on his, the pleading childish face, the gentle childish voice, had spoken to him of the love of Christ. There are hard, sinful, unlovely souls, who yet long to be loved, who sigh in their dark prison for that tenderness, that devotion, of which they are consciously unworthy. Love might redeem them; but who can love them? There is a fable of a prince doomed by a cruel enchanter to wear a loathsome, bestial form till some fair woman should redeem him by the transforming kiss of love. The fable is a parable of the experience of many a lost human soul. The religion of Christ owes its peculiar power to its revealing a Divine Lover, the one Only Fair, the altogether Beautiful, who can love the unlovely back into perfectness. The love of Christ has been the dissolving power that has broken the spells and enchantments which held human souls in bondage and has given them power to rise to the beauty and freedom of the sons of God.