'Oh, father,' I exclaimed, with a sudden rush of tears, 'and the one He's asked for back was always called "the lamb"!'
And then the horror of that 'perilous stuff' swept over me, and all the despair and doubt and misery of the last few months surged up like a great flood that presently would overwhelm me, and I cried,—
'But, oh, daddy! He isn't my Shepherd Beautiful, I can't find His love; I can only see some one who has been very cruel to me.'
And father put his arm round me as he used to do when I was little and frightened in the woods, and the evening sun streamed down upon his face, and deepened the aloof look that he wore, and he gazed out over the fields of lilies that were tinted now with gold and rose.
'Yet, it is He who clothes the woods you love so every spring, my darling.'
And as I looked at all the colour and the harmony, the flowers, the sunlight, and the dappled shade, the woods soothed and quietened me. And the old 'washed' feeling came, and the rebellion went, and a great longing to understand God's ways came in my heart instead.
'Oh, but the world's pain, father, and all the grief brought by the war.'
'God calls the world that way sometimes, Meg.'
'But does He never call except through pain?'
'Some very perfect souls can feel Him "in the summer air or in dewy garden green," or in the song of birds, but to many it is only "when the sharp strokes flesh and heart run through, in all their incommunicable pain"—God speaks Himself.'