“I never think about that; I only think about doing His will now--not about doing it then--that is, to-morrow or next day or next world. I know only one life--the life that is hid with Christ in God; and that is the life by which I live here and now. I do not make schemes of life; I live. Life will teach me God's plans; I will take no trouble about them; I will only obey, and receive the bliss He sends me. And of all things I will not make theories of God's plans for other people to accept. I will only do my best to destroy such theories as I find coming between some poor glooming heart, and the sun shining in his strength. Those who love the shade of lies, let them walk in it until the shiver of the eternal cold drive them to seek the face of Jesus Christ. To appeal to their intellect would be but to drive them the deeper into the shade to justify their being in it. And if by argument you did persuade them out of it, they would but run into a deeper and worse darkness.” “How could that be?” “They would at once think that, by an intellectual stride they had advanced in the spiritual life, whereas they would be neither the better nor the worse. I know a man, once among the foremost in denouncing the old theology, who is now no better than a swindler.” “You mean--” “No one you know, ma'am. His intellectual freedom seems only to have served his spiritual subjugation. Right opinion, except it spring from obedience to the truth, is but so much rubbish on the golden floor of the temple.” The peace of the night and its luminous earnestness were gleaming on Andrew's face, and Alexa, glancing up as he ceased, felt again the inroad of a sense of something in the man that was not in the other men she knew--the spiritual shadow of a dweller in regions beyond her ken. The man was before her, yet out of her sight! The whole thing was too simple for her, only a child could understand it Instead of listening to the elders and priests to learn how to save his soul, he cast away all care of himself, left that to God, and gave himself to do the will of Him from whose heart he came, even as the eternal Life, the Son of God, required of him; in the mighty hope of becoming one mind, heart, soul, one eternal being, with Him, with the Father, with every good man, with the universe which was his inheritance--walking in the world as Enoch walked with God, held by his hand. This is what man was and is meant to be, what man must become; thither the wheels of time are roaring; thither work all the silent potencies of the eternal world; and they that will not awake and arise from the dead must be flung from their graves by the throes of a shivering world.