“I will try then,” said Malcolm. “--Everybody knows what few think about, that once there lived a man who, in the broad face of prejudiced respectability, truth-hating hypocrisy, common-place religion, and dull book-learning, affirmed that he knew the secret of life, and understood the heart and history of men--who wept over their sorrows, yet worshipped the God of the whole earth, saying that he had known him from eternal days. The same said that he came to do what the Father did, and that he did nothing but what he had learned of the Father. They killed him, you know, my lady, in a terrible way that one is afraid even to think of. But he insisted that he laid down his life; that he allowed them to take it. Now I ask whether that grandest thing, crowning his life, the yielding of it to the hand of violence, he had not learned also from his Father. Was his death the only thing he had not so learned? If I am right, and I do not say _if_ in doubt, then the suffering of those three terrible hours was a type of the suffering of the Father himself in bringing sons and daughters through the cleansing and glorifying fires, without which the created cannot be made the very children of God, partakers of the divine nature and peace. Then from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering, up to the loftiest pitch, the divinest acme of pain, there is not one pang to which the sensorium of the universe does not respond; never an untuneful vibration of nerve or spirit but thrills beyond the brain or the heart of the sufferer to the brain, the heart of the universe; and God, in the simplest, most literal, fullest sense, and not by sympathy alone, suffers _with_ his creatures.” “Well, but he is able to bear it; they are not: I cannot bring myself to see the right of it.” “Nor will you, my lady, so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good they get by it.--My lady, when I was trying my best with poor Kelpie, you would not listen to me.” “You are ungenerous,” said Clementina, flushing.