"Do you think," I said, "that any one, before he came, could have imagined such a visitor to the world as Jesus Christ?" "I suppose not," she answered listlessly. "Then, no more can you come near him now by trying to imagine him. You cannot represent to yourself the reality, the Being who can comfort you. In other words, you cannot take him into your heart. He only knows himself, and he only can reveal himself to you. And not until he does so, can you find any certainty or any peace." "But he doesn't--he won't reveal himself to me." "Suppose you had forgotten what some friend of your childhood was like--say, if it were possible, your own mother; suppose you could not recall a feature of her face, or the color of her eyes; and suppose, that, while you were very miserable about it, you remembered all at once that you had a portrait of her in an old desk you had not opened for years: what would you do?" "Go and get it," she answered like a child at the Sunday school. "Then why shouldn't you do so now? You have such a portrait of Jesus, far truer and more complete than any other kind of portrait can be,--the portrait his own deeds and words give us of him." "I see what you mean; but that is all about long ago, and I want him now. That is in a book, and I want him in my heart." "How are you to get him into your heart? How could you have him there, except by knowing him? But perhaps you think you do know him?" "I am certain I do not know him; at least, as I want to know him," she said. "No doubt," I went on, "he can speak to your heart without the record, and, I think, is speaking to you now in this very want of him you feel. But how could he show himself to you otherwise than by helping you to understand the revelation of himself which it cost him such labor to afford? If the story were millions of years old, so long as it was true, it would be all the same as if it had been ended only yesterday; for, being what he represented himself, he never can change. To know what he was then, is to know what he is now." "But, if I knew him so, that wouldn't be to have him with me." "No; but in that knowledge he might come to you. It is by the door of that knowledge that his Spirit, which is himself, comes into the soul. You would at least be more able to pray to him: you would know what kind of a being you had to cry to. _You_ would thus come nearer to him; and no one ever drew nigh to him to whom he did not also draw nigh. If you would but read the story as if you had never read it before, as if you were reading the history of a man you heard of for the first time"-- "Surely you're not a Unitarian, Mrs. Percivale!" she said, half lifting her head, and looking at me with a dim terror in her pale eyes.