“But you say,” said I, “that Epictetus, too, is right.” “Certainly,” replied Clemens. “Epictetus says that men, God’s children, are never ‘alone.’ And that is true. Indeed I can shew you presently a new Christian gospel—the one I mentioned just now—which represents Christ as saying this very thing, ‘Ye shall leave me alone—and yet I am _not alone_, because the Father is with me.’ Look at the matter thus. Do we not know that God may be regarded as being in all places at once, so that to speak of Him as ‘here and not there’ is no less a metaphor than to speak of His ‘hiding His countenance,’ or ‘bearing us in His arms’? God therefore is, as Epictetus often affirms, ‘within us.’ But is He not also (as I think Epictetus seldom or never affirms) ‘outside us’? Is not the Psalmist’s metaphor right when he says that God, being outside us, hides His face sometimes from His children? Sometimes He does this because they have sinned, in order that they may seek His face and cease to sin. But does He not also do this when men have not sinned, in order that the righteous may become more righteous and the pure more pure, by longing more than ever for the sight of His countenance and by thirsting anew for His presence? “I do not quite like to explain the dealings of God with men by anything that frail human creatures do in sport. And yet there is something so sacred (at least I think so) in the relations between parents and young children, that I have been sometimes led to liken God hiding His face from His children to a mother hiding her face from the babe in her arms. She hides it, but only for a moment, only that the child may be the more joyful afterwards. And the arms never let go their embrace.” Then, after a pause, he added, “But perhaps you say, ‘Do not you Christians believe that Christ was already perfectly righteous, and perfectly pure, and that He already rejoiced to the utmost in the Father’s love? Why then should God forsake such a Son? Why should He hide His face from the Holy One, even for a time?’ That, I think, is the question you would like to ask?”