“Nay, ‘No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous.’ Yet ‘faint not when thou art rebuked of Him.’”
“It is the going on, that is so terrible!” said the Earl, almost under his breath. “If one might die when one’s hope dies! Father, do you know anything of that?”
“In this world, my Lord, I dug a grave in mine own heart for all my hopes, forty years ago.”
“And can you look back on that time calmly?”
“That depends on what you mean by calmness. Trustfully, yes; indifferently, no.”
“Yet the religious say that God requires their affections to be detached from the world. That must produce deadness of feeling.”
“My Lord, there is such a thing as being alive from the dead. That is what God requires. If we tarry at the dying, we shall stop short of His perfection. We are to be dead to sin; but I nowhere find in Scripture that we are to die to love and happiness. That is man’s gloss upon God’s precept.”
“Is that what you teach in your valleys?”
“We teach God’s Word,” said the Vaudois Prior. “Alas! for the men that have made it void through their tradition! ‘If they speak not according thereunto, it is because there is no light in them.’”
“And you learn—” suggested the Earl in a more interested tone.