"'_It is I, be not afraid,_'" she said, in a low, clear tone, contrasting with my awe-stricken whisper. "Whenever thou dost not understand the voice that thunders, sweet heart, go back to the voice that speaks, and that will tell thee what the voice that thunders means." "Aunt Gretel," said I, after a little silence, "it seemed to me as if Lady Lucy were like some words of our Saviour's. As if everything in her were saying in a soft dove's voice, 'Suffer the little children to come unto Me.' Was it wrong to think so? It seemed as if I were sitting beside my Mother, and then I thought of those very words. Was it wrong?" "Not wrong, my poor motherless lamb," said she, "no, surely not wrong. Remember, Olive, from Paradise downwards the worst heresy has been slander of the love of God; distrust of His love, and disbelief of the awful warnings His love gives against sin. Whenever we feel anything very tender in any human love, we should feel as if the blessed God were stretching out His arms to us through it, and saying, 'That is a little like the way I love thee. But only a little, only a little.'" And the thunder rolled on, and the lightning that night cleft the great elm by the gate, so that in the morning it stood a scorched and blackened trunk. And Aunt Dorothy said what an awful warning it was. But to me, if it was an "awful warning," it stood also like a parable of mercy. I could not exactly have explained why; but I thought I could read the meaning of the Voice that thundered by the Voice that spoke. I thought how He had been scathed and bruised for us. And I pleaded hard with my father that the old scathed tree might not be felled. For to me its great bare blackened branches seemed to shelter the house like that accursed tree which had spread its bare arms one Good Friday night outside Jerusalem, and had pleaded not for vengeance, but for pity and for pardon. I think the resentment of injustice is one of the first-born and strongest passions in an ingenuous heart. And to this, I believe, is often due the falling off of children from the party of their parents, They hear hard things said of opponents; on closer acquaintance they find these to be exaggerations, or, at least, suppressions; the general gloom of a picture being even more produced by effacing lights than by deepening shadows. The discovery throws a doubt over the whole range of inherited beliefs, and it is well if in the heat of youth the revulsion is not far greater than the wrong; if in their indignation at discovering that the heretic is not an embodied heresy, but merely a human creature believing something wrong, they do not glorify him into a martyr and a model.