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CHAPTER VIII.
THE BUTTERFLY.
As Wingfold walked home that afternoon, he thought much of what he
had heard and seen. "If there be a God," he said to himself, "then
all is well, for certainly he would not give being to such a woman,
and then throw her aside as a failure, and forget her. It is strange
to see, though, how he permits his work to be thwarted. To be the
perfect God notwithstanding, he must be able to turn the very
thwarting to higher furtherance. Don't we see something of the sort
in life--the vigorous nursed by the arduous? Is it presumptuous to
imagine God saying to Rachel: 'Trust me, and bear, and I will do
better for thee than thou canst think?' Certainly the one who most
needs the comfort of such a faith, in this case HAS it. I wish I
could be as sure of him as Rachel Polwarth!--But then," he added,
smiling to himself, "she has had her crooked spine to help her! It
seems as if nothing less than the spiritual beholding of the Eternal
will produce at least absolute belief. And till then what better or
indeed other proof can the less receive of the presence of the
greater than the expansion of its own being under the influences of
that greater? But my plague now is that the ideas of religion are so
grand, and the things all around it in life so common-place, that
they give the lie to each other from morning to night--in my mind, I
mean.
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