"It cannot be necessary to be so very good," said Margaret.
"It is quite necessary to try to be," answered Mrs Herbert. "God will never accept anything but our whole hearts. You must remember our Saviour's words, 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' Certainly this must mean that we are to be what you call very good."
"But," said Margaret, "I thought no one could be good enough to deserve to go to heaven."
"No, indeed, they cannot. But supposing, Margaret, that a great prince were to come to Emmerton and offer to adopt you as his child, and were to promise that, if you would do everything he wished, he would, in time, take you to his kingdom, and give you riches and honours beyond all that you could possibly imagine, do you not see that, although you never could have merited such kindness, though it would be a perfectly free gift on his part, yet that, if you refused to obey, you would justly deserve to lose it?"
Margaret assented; but she did not seem entirely to understand what was intended, and Mrs Herbert continued: "This is exactly the case with ourselves, my dear. God gives us all the promise of heaven, for the sake of our Saviour, when we are baptized; but He also requires that we should obey Him; and therefore, if we neglect to do so, the consequences must be our own eternal misery."
"I don't mean," said Margaret, "that I would not try to be good at all; but that I don't think it can be necessary to be like the saints and people who shut themselves up, and never saw any one."
Mrs Herbert half smiled as she replied, "Certainly God does not require that we should all live exactly the same lives as the persons you mention—He does not command us all to leave our homes and go to deserts; but it is possible to have the same tempers and dispositions as the saints, though we may live in our own families."
"How can we set about being so good?" asked Margaret.
"First of all," replied her aunt, "we must pray to God to give us the will; and when we have that, half our difficulty will be over. It is seldom really hard to us to do what we earnestly desire; even things which seemed quite impossible have been accomplished by a real earnestness of purpose. There is a story told of a man whose father from extravagance had brought his family to great poverty, and who, when he became of age, instead of being possessed of large estates, was absolutely penniless. He was standing one day upon the top of a very high hill, looking over a vast extent of country that had belonged to his ancestors, and which, but for his father's folly, would have been his, when the idea entered his mind that it would be possible by his own exertions to recover all that had been lost. From that moment he resolved that he would never rest till he had achieved his wishes. He worked by night and by day, he gave himself no rest and no amusement; and at length he succeeded, and the estate was his. And though the end of the story is a very sad one, and shows us the sin and folly of setting our hearts on earthly objects,—for we are told that the poor man became from habit a miser as soon as he gained his end,—yet we may learn from it how much is in the power of persons who are really and sincerely in earnest."
"I think I could have felt like that man," said Margaret; "but I should never care so much about being good."