The words fell heavily on my heart. Was this the gospel? I thought. Evil never, never to be undone, sin never to be the same as if it had not been? Placidia said no more until Roger and my Father went out on the farm together, and we were left alone with Aunt Gretel, and then she observed in her deliberate way, with a slow shake of her head,-- "I hope Cousin Roger is not still in the dark. I trust he understands the gospel--" "What do you mean by the gospel, Placidia?" said I, half roused on Roger's account and half troubled on my own. Placidia, always ready (at that time) with a theological definition, neatly folded and packed, entered into a disquisition of some length as to what she understood by "the gospel." In a deliberate and business-like manner she undertook to explain the purposes of the Almighty from the beginning, as if she had, in some inexplicable way, been in the confidence of Heaven before the beginning, and comprehended not only all the purposes of the Eternal, but the reasons on which these purposes were founded. The effect produced on my mind was as if the whole life-giving stream of redeeming love flowing from the glorious unity of the living God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, had been frozen into a rigid contract between certain high sovereign powers for the purchase of a certain inheritance for their own use, in which the utmost care was taken on all sides that the quantity paid and the quantity received should be precisely equivalent. It was as if the whole living, breathing world, with its infinite blue heavens, its abounding rivers, its waving corn-fields, its heaving seas, and all that is therein, had been shrivelled into a map of estates, in which nothing was of importance but the dividing lines. These "dividing lines" of her system might, for aught I knew, be correct enough, might be those of the Bible itself; but the awful Omnipresence, the real holy indignation against wrong, the love, the life, the yearning, pitying, repenting, immutably just, yet tenderly forgiving heart which beats in every page of the Bible, had vanished altogether. All the while she spoke, as it were in spite of myself, the words kept running through my head, "They that make them are like unto them." At the close she said, turning to Aunt Gretel,-- "I think I have stated the gospel clearly. I only hope Cousin Roger understands it."