"But surely, husband, you can say it all the same," said my wife. "I will go away if you can't." "I can say it all the better, my love. Come and sit down here beside me. I was trying to show Connie--" "You did show me, papa." "Well, I was showing Connie that a gift has sometimes to be taken away again before we can know what it is worth, and so receive it right." Ethelwyn sighed. She was always more open to the mournful than the glad. Her heart had been dreadfully wrung in her youth. "And I was going on to give her the greatest instance of it in human history. As long as our Lord was with his disciples, they could not see him right: he was too near them. Too much light, too many words, too much revelation, blinds or stupefies. The Lord had been with them long enough. They loved him dearly, and yet often forgot his words almost as soon as he said them. He could not get it into them, for instance, that he had not come to be a king. Whatever he said, they shaped it over again after their own fancy; and their minds were so full of their own worldly notions of grandeur and command, that they could not receive into their souls the gift of God present before their eyes. Therefore he was taken away, that his Spirit, which was more himself than his bodily presence, might come into them--that they might receive the gift of God into their innermost being. After he had gone out of their sight, and they might look all around and down in the grave and up in the air, and not see him anywhere--when they thought they had lost him, he began to come to them again from the other side--from the inside. They found that the image of him which his presence with them had printed in light upon their souls, began to revive in the dark of his absence; and not that only, but that in looking at it without the overwhelming of his bodily presence, lines and forms and meanings began to dawn out of it which they had never seen before. And his words came back to them, no longer as they had received them, but as he meant them. The spirit of Christ filling their hearts and giving them new power, made them remember, by making them able to understand, all that he had said to them. They were then always saying to each other, 'You remember how;' whereas before, they had been always staring at each other with astonishment and something very near incredulity, while he spoke to them. So that after he had gone away, he was really nearer to them than he had been before. The meaning of anything is more than its visible presence. There is a soul in everything, and that soul is the meaning of it. The soul of the world and all its beauty has come nearer to you, my dear, just because you are separated from it for a time." "Thank you, dear papa. I do like to get a little sermon all to myself now and then. That is another good of being ill." "You don't mean me to have a share in it, then, Connie, do you?" said my wife, smiling at her daughter's pleasure.