‘I have known people who could say that without knowing it all now, Mr Cumbermede,’ said Mary. I had often called her by her Christian name, but she had never accepted the familiarity. ‘No doubt,’ said Charley, ‘but _I_‘m not one of those.’ ‘If you would but give in,’ said his sister, ‘you would--in the end, I mean--say, “It is well.” I am sure of that.’ ‘Yes--perhaps I might--after all the suffering had been forced upon me, and was over at last--when I had been thoroughly exhausted and cowed, that is.’ ‘Which wouldn’t satisfy any thinking soul, Charley--much less God,’ I said. ‘But if there be a God at all--’ Mary gave a slight inarticulate cry. ‘Dear Miss Osborne,’ I said, ‘I beg you will not misunderstand me. I cannot be sure about it, as you are--I wish I could--but I am not disputing it in the least; I am only trying to make my argument as strong as I can.--I was going to say to Charley--not to you--that, if there be a God, he would not have compelled us to be, except with the absolute fore-knowledge that, when we knew all about it, we would certainly declare ourselves ready to go through it all again if need should be, in order to attain the known end of his high calling.’ ‘But isn’t it very presumptuous to assert anything about God which he has not revealed in his Word?’ said Mary, in a gentle, subdued voice, and looking at me with a sweet doubtfulness in her eyes. ‘I am only insisting on the perfection of God--as far as I can understand perfection,’ I answered. ‘But may not the perfection of God be something very different from anything we _can_ understand?’ ‘I will go further,’ I returned. ‘It _must_ be something that we cannot understand--but different from what we can understand by being greater, not by being less.’ ‘Mayn’t it be such that we can’t understand it at all?’ she insisted. ‘Then how should we ever worship him? How should we ever rejoice in him? Surely it is because you see God to be good--’ ‘Or fancy you do,’ interposed Charley. ‘Or fancy you do,’ I assented, ‘that you love him--not merely because you are told he is good. The Fejee islander might assert his God to be good, but would that make you love him? If you heard that a great power, away somewhere, who had nothing to do with you at all, was very good, would that make you able to love him?’ ‘Yes, it would,’ said Mary, decidedly. ‘It is only a good man who would see that God was good.’ ‘There you argue entirely on my side. It must be because you supposed his goodness what you call goodness--not something else--that you could love him on testimony. But even then your love could not be of that mighty absorbing kind which alone you would think fit between you and your God. It would not be loving him with all your heart and soul and strength and mind--would it? It would be loving him second-hand--not because of himself, seen and known by yourself.’ ‘But Charley does not even love God second-hand,’ she said, with a despairing mournfulness.