Things went on very quietly for a time. Arctura grew better, resumed her studies, and made excellent progress. She would have worked harder, but Donal would not let her. He hated forcing--even with the good will of the plant itself. He believed in a holy, unhasting growth. God's ways want God's time.
Long after, people would sometimes say to him--"That is very well in the abstract; but in these days of hurry a young fellow would that way be left ages behind!"
"With God," would Donal say.
"Tut, tut! the thing would never work!"
"For your ends," Donal would answer, "it certainly would never work; but your ends are not those of the universe!"
"I do not pretend they are; but they are the success of the boy."
"That is one of the ends of the universe; and your reward will be to thwart it for a season. I decline to make one in a conspiracy against the design of our creator: I would fain die loyal!"
He was of course laughed at, and not a little despised, as an extravagant enthusiast. But those who laughed found it hard to say for what he was enthusiastic. It seemed hardly for education, when he would even do what he could sometimes to keep a pupil back! He did not care to make the best of any one! The truth was, Donal's best was so many miles a-head of theirs, that it was below their horizon altogether. If there be any relation between time and the human mind, every forcing of human process, whether in spirit or intellect, is hurtful, a retarding of God's plan.
Lady Arctura's old troubles were gradually fading into the limbo of vanities. At times, however, mostly when unwell, they would come in upon her like a flood: what if, after all, God were the self-loving being theology presented--a being from whom no loving human heart could but recoil with a holy dislike! what if it was because of a nature specially evil that she could not accept the God in whom the priests and elders of her people believed! But again and again, in the midst of profoundest wretchedness from such doubt, had a sudden flush of the world's beauty--that beauty which Jesus has told us to consider and the modern pharisee to avoid, broken like gentlest mightiest sunrise through the hellish fog, and she had felt a power upon her as from the heart of a very God--a God such as she would give her life to believe in--one before whom she would cast herself in speechless adoration--not of his greatness--of that she felt little, but of his lovingkindness, the gentleness that was making her great. Then would she care utterly for God and his Christ, nothing for what men said about them: the Lord never meant his lambs to be under the tyranny of any, least of all the tyranny of his own most imperfect church! its work is to teach; where it cannot teach, it must not rule! Then would God appear to her not only true, but real--the heart of the human, to which she could cling, and so rest.
The corruption of all religion comes of leaving the human, and God as the causing Human, for something imagined holier. Men who do not see the loveliness of the Truth, search till they find a lie they can call lovely. What but a human reality could the heart of man ever love! what else are we offered in Jesus but the absolutely human? That Jesus has two natures is of the most mischievous fictions of theology. The divine and the human are not two.
