"Sin?"

"Yes," said Dr. Lavendar, cheerfully; "have you ever noticed that

every single human experience--except, perhaps, the stagnation of

conceit; I haven't found anything hopeful in that yet; but maybe I

shall some day!--but, except for conceit, I have never known any human

experience of pain or sin that could not be the gate of heaven. Mind!

I don't say that it always is; but it can be. Has that ever occurred

to you?"

"Well, no," the doctor confessed; "I can't say that it has."

"Oh, you're young yet," Dr, Lavendar said encouragingly, "My boy, let

me tell you that there are some good folks who don't begin to know

their Heavenly Father, as the sinner does who climbed up to Him out of

the gutter."

"A dangerous doctrine," William ruminated.

"Oh, I don't preach it," Dr. Lavendar said placidly "but I don't

preach everything I know."

William was not following him. He said abruptly, "What are you going

to do with David?"

"David is going to stay with me."

And William said again, "It will break her heart!"

"I hope so," said Dr. Lavendar solemnly, How he watched that poor

heart, in the next few days! Every afternoon his shabby old buggy went

tugging up the hill. Sometimes he found her walking restlessly about

in the frosted garden; sometimes standing mutely at the long window in

the parlor, looking for him; sometimes prostrate on her bed. When he

took her hand--listless one day, fiercely despairing the next,--he

would glance at her with a swift scrutiny that questioned, and then

waited. The pity in his old eyes never dimmed their relentless

keenness; they seemed to raid her face, sounding all the shallows in

search of depths. For with his exultant faith in human nature, he

believed that somewhere in the depths he should find God, It is only

the pure in heart who can find Him in impurity, who can see, behind

the murky veil of stained flesh, the very face of Christ declaring the

possibilities of the flesh!--but this old man sought and knew that he

should find Him. He waited and watched for many days, looking for that

recognition of wrong-doing which breaks the heart by its revelation of

goodness that might have been; for there is no true knowledge of sin,

without a divine and redeeming knowledge of righteousness! So, as this

old saint looked into the breaking heart, pity for the sinner who was

base deepened into reverence for the child of God who might be noble.

It is an easy matter to believe in the confident soul; but Dr.

Lavendar believed in a soul that did not believe in itself!




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