“‘Perhaps you need nothing more,’ he answered quietly. ‘If so, well and good. Clear insight is not essential to living a noble life. If you have really grasped the spiritual meaning of Christianity it matters little that you should hold it in a more naive and literal way than I am able to. If in this age you can accept unquestioningly everything that has been taught you, if you never have a doubt, I would be the last person to raise one, for I know what mental misery would ensue in one educated as you have been. But so long as your religious faiths have been inherited, like your hair and eyes, and you have not examined them so as to make them your own, pardon my saying that there is small virtue in your holding them, and so far as your own thought goes you might as well have been a Papist or a Mohammedan.’ “‘But what is the use of mental misery? Why should I encourage doubts and unrest? Is it not far better to trust in God and not venture to question all the strange things that he allows?’ “‘You ask two or three questions at once; let me take them one at a time. Five years ago I asked just those same questions, and I know how you feel.’ He spoke tenderly, and his voice comforted me. I was beginning to get nervous and troubled and felt myself in deep waters. “‘No great thing is ever born into this world except by suffering. If we are put here simply for pleasure, for calm content, for peace of mind, let us banish all questioning and dread it as a precursor of the nightmare. Yes, if immediate peace of mind is the primary consideration, let us, like the ostrich, bury our heads in the sand, like the chicken refuse to pick our way through the shell, and be turned out of our warm corner into the bare, cold world outside. If peace of mind is our chief aim, let us stop thinking once for all. It is dangerous. Yes, thinking is always dangerous; dangerous to one’s love of ease and content with existing ideas. The little shoot content with its environment in the dark mould will never reach the sunlight until first it struggles upward from the conditions that surround it. “‘Many a time in the last four years I have said to myself, in the night of horror that swept over me, when I felt as if the foundations beneath me had broken away, “whether the Bible be true, or life eternal, or God a father, I do not know; but this one thing I do know: I must be true; I must be unselfish; I must go on and seek the light;” and, thank God, I have begun to find it at last.’ “Mr. Everett spoke with a quiet intensity of feeling that awed me. However, I ventured to ask, rather timidly, ‘But you did find—you do believe in the Bible now, don’t you?’