At the same time a great sorrow threatened him from the no less mysterious region of his relations to humanity; but if that region and its most inexplicable cares were beyond the rule of the Life that dwelt in him, then was that Life no true God, and the whole thing was false; for he loved Helen with a love that was no invention or creation of his own, and if not his, then whose? Certainly not of one who, when it threatened to overwhelm him, was unable to uphold him under it! This thing also belonged to the God of his being. A poor God must he be for men or women who did not care about the awful things involved in the relation between them! Therefore even in his worst anxieties about Helen,--I do not mean in his worst seasons of despair at the thought of never gaining her love--he had never yet indeed consciously regarded the winning of her as a possibility--but at those times when he most plainly saw her the submissive disciple of George Bascombe, and the two seemed to his fancy to be straying away together “into a wide field, full of dark mountains;” when he saw her, so capable of the noblest, submitting her mind to the entrance of the poorest, meanest, shabbiest theories of life, and taking for her guide one who could lead her to no conscious well-being, or make provision for sustainment when the time of suffering and anxiety should come, or the time of health and strength be over when yet she must live on; when he saw her adopting a system of things whose influence would shrivel up instead of developing her faculties, crush her imagination with such a mountain-weight as was never piled above Titan, and dwarf the whole divine woman within her to the size and condition of an Aztec--even then was he able to reason with himself: “She belongs to God, not to me; and God loves her better than ever I could love her. If she should set out with her blind guide, it will be but a first day’s journey she will go--through marshy places and dry sands, across the far breadth of which, lo! the blue mountains that shelter the high vales of sweetness and peace.” And with this he not only tried to comfort himself, but succeeded--I do not say to contentment, but to quiet. Contentment, which, whatever its immediate shape, to be contentment at all, must be the will of God, lay beyond. Alas that men cannot believe there is such a thing as “that good and acceptable and perfect will of God!” To those that do believe it, it is the rejoicing of a conscious deliverance.