"Mother, I bring you something that carries on your idea."
He went out, showed them his father's writing, and said that he would read to them.
"Ah yes," exclaimed Manna; "it is good and kind of you to bring your father here; how I would have liked to know him. Do you not believe that he is now looking down upon us?"
Eric looked at his mother; he did not know what answer to give, and the Mother said:—
"According to the ordinary conception of the word 'looking,' we cannot conceive its being done without eyes. We have no conception how a spirit exists, but there is not a day nor an hour that I do not live in communion with my departed husband; he has come with me here, he will remain with me wherever I go, till my last breath. But let me see—what is it, Eric?"
"It has an odd title," answered the latter; "it treats of these things, which I cannot explain, and which perhaps no one can explain."
"Read, I beg of you," entreated Manna.
Eric began to read:—
"Two things there are which stand firm, while the heart of man is kept vacillating between defiance and despondency, haughtiness and faint-heartedness; they are nature and the ideal within us. The church is also a strong-hold of the ideal, firm and secure; although for me and many like me, it is not the only one.
"You say, nature does not help us. What help is she to me, when the crushing conviction of imperfection, of perdition, of guilt comes upon me and takes me captive? Well, nature does not speak; she simply permits herself to be explained, understood; she gives back the echo of what we call out to her. The church, on the contrary, speaks to us in our individual griefs, she takes us up into the universal; that is the great lesson of the expiatory suffering. We lay our grief aside when we think of the great grief which the greatest of hearts took unto itself.