She shook her head. “I don’t know how fast you might reform if you really, sincerely tried. But I think it would be very fast. And if you, a great, big, powerful man, with the most wonderful opportunities in the world, should really try to be a success, why––well, I’m sure you’d make very rapid progress, and help others like you by setting such a great example. For you are a wonderful man––you really are.”
Ames looked at her long and quizzically. What did the girl mean? Then he took her hand, this time without resistance.
“Tell me, little girl––although I know there can be no doubt of it––are you a success?”
She raised her luminous eyes to his. “Yes,” she replied simply.
He let fall her hand in astonishment. “Well!” he ejaculated, “would you mind telling me just why?”
She smiled up at him, and her sweet trustfulness drew his sagging heartstrings suddenly taut.
“Because,” she said simply, “I strive every moment to ‘acquire that mind which was in Christ Jesus.’”
Silence fell upon them. From amusement to wonder, to irritation, to anger, then to astonishment, and a final approximation to something akin to reverent awe had been the swift course of the man’s emotions as he sat in this secluded nook 141 beside this strange girl. The poisoned arrows of his worldly thought had broken one by one against the shield of her protecting faith. His badinage had returned to confound himself. The desire to possess had utterly fled before the conviction that such thought was as wildly impossible as iniquitous.
Then he suddenly became conscious that the little body beside him had drawn closer––that it was pressing against him––that a little hand had stolen gently into his––and that a soft voice, soft as the summer winds that sigh among the roses, was floating to his ears.
“To be really great is to be like that wonderful man, Jesus. It is to know that through him the great Christ-principle worked and did those things which the world will not accept, because it thinks them miracles. It is to know that God is love, and to act that knowledge. It is to know that love is the Christ-principle, and that it will destroy every error, every discord, everything that is unlike itself. It is to yield your present false sense of happiness and good to the true sense of God as infinite good. It is to bring every thought into captivity to this Christ-principle, love. It is to stop looking at evil as a reality. It is to let go your hold on it, and let it fade away before the wonderful truth that God is everywhere, and that there isn’t anything apart from Him. Won’t you try it? You will have to, some day. I have tried it. I know it’s true. I’ve proved it.”