"We believe that Jesus Christ is God, do we not?" she half mused, half questioned, her brows contracting with intense thought.
"Yes," he said reverently.
"Why, Mr. Hemstead, don't you see—don't you see? This Being who is so keenly sympathetic, so tenderly alive to a spene of sorrow, that He weeps and groans, though knowing that joy is coming in a moment, is not the calm, passionless, inflexible God you chilled our hearts with this morning. Why, this is the very extravagance of tender-heartedness. This is a gentleness that I can scarcely understand. What mother, even, would first weep with her children over a sorrow that she was about to remove with a word! And yet this all-powerful Jesus, who can raise the dead to life, seems to cry just because the others do,—just as if He couldn't help it,—just as dear, good Auntie Jane's eyes moisten when she hears of any one in trouble. Mr. Hemstead, there is surely a mistake somewhere. How do you reconcile this Christ with the one you presented this morning?"
"I don't, and cannot."
"And yet He did say to His disciples, 'I am glad I was not there,'" continued Lottie, in deep perplexity.
Hemstead paced the room excitedly a few minutes, and then exclaimed,
"It's growing as clear and beautiful as the light."
"It seems to me flat contradiction," said Lottie, dejectedly. "There are the words, 'I am glad I was not there '; and there is the fact that He let Lazarus die; and there also are the facts of His weeping and raising Lazarus: and, now I think of it, He performed many miracles equally kind, and helped and encouraged all sorts of people."
"Certainly He did," cried Hemstead. "Blind idiot that I was in developing a crude theological idea of my own, instead of simply presenting the God of the Bible! I can never thank you enough, Miss Marsden, for your strong good sense that has dissipated my fog-bank of words. I think I see the way into light. You have placed a clew in my hands which I trust will lead, not only me, but others into peace. I fear I did present to you a calm, unimpassioned, inflexible Being this morning,—a God of purposes and decrees and remorseless will; and I have felt before that this was the God of theology and religious philosophy, rather than the God of the Bible. Your words have shown me that I gave you a crude and one-sided view. Thoughts are thronging so upon my mind that I am confused, but it comes to me with almost the force of an inspiration that Christ's tears of sympathy form the key to the whole Bible."
"Well," said Lottie, in a low tone, "I can see how they might become the key to my heart. Come, Mr. Hemstead, I have been a heathen up to this time; and I hope you have been a heretic. If you can explain the Bible in accordance with Christ's tears, as He wept, when the kindest man living would have smiled, in view of the change so soon to occur,—then preach by all means. That is the kind of gospel we want. If I could believe that God felt with, and for, his creatures as tenderly as that, it seems to me that I could go to Him as naturally as I ever went to Auntie Jane in my troubles."
Hemstead was pacing the room, as was his custom when excited. His face was aglow with earnest, elevating thoughts. His ungainliness had utterly vanished; and Lottie acknowledged that she had never seen a nobler-looking man. She felt that perhaps they were both on the threshold of a larger and richer life than they had ever known before. She saw dimly, as through a mist, that which her heart longed to believe,—the truth that God does care about His earthly children,—that He was not to her a mere shaping force or power, but a tender, gentle-hearted helper. Therefore she waited eagerly and hopefully for Hemstead to speak.