'Prepare to Meet thy God!'
How could he, with his old hate in his heart, stand in the presence of a God of Love?
Standing there bareheaded, with one foot on the prone tombstone, Rodney grappled with the passion that he had cherished through the years, and thus took his first step along the path of preparation.
'I forgive the woman who came between us,' he said aloud. 'My God, I forgive her--as I hope to be forgiven!'
'As soon as a man comes to understand that GOD IS LOVE,' said Dr. Chalmers, 'he is infallibly converted.' That being so, Rodney Steele was infallibly converted that day, and that day he entered into peace.
VII
When Robert Louis Stevenson settled at Samoa, the islands were ablaze with tumult and strife. And, during those years of bitterness, Stevenson did his utmost to bring the painful struggle to an end. He visited the chiefs in prison, lavished his kindnesses upon the islanders, and made himself the friend of all. In the course of time the natives became devotedly attached to the frail and delicate foreigner who looked as though the first gust of wind would blow him away. His health required that he should live away on the hill-top, and they pitied him as he painfully toiled up the stony slope. To show their affection for him, they built a road right up to his house, in order to make the steep ascent more easy. And they called that road Ala Loto Alofa--The Road to the Loving Heart. They felt, as they toiled at their labor of gratitude, that they were not only conferring a boon on the white man, but that they were making a beaten path from their own doors to the heart that loved them all.
God is Love; and it is the glory of the everlasting Gospel that it points the road by which the Father's wayward sons--in whichever of the far countries they may have wandered--may find a way back to the Father's house, and home to the Loving Heart.