“You may talk as you see fit, Mr. Grant, but while Paul teaches the doctrine, I will hold it; he may perhaps know a little better than you.”
“Paul teaches no such doctrine. He teaches just what I have been saying. The word translated adoption, he uses for the raising of one who is a son to the true position of a son.”
“The presumption in you to say what the apostle did or did not mean!”
“Why, Miss Carmichael, do you think the gospel comes to us as a set of fools? Is there any way of truly or worthily receiving a message without understanding it? A message is sent for the very sake of being in some measure at least understood. Without that it would be no message at all. I am bound by the will and express command of the master to understand the things he says to me. He commands me to see their rectitude, because they being true, I ought to be able to see them true. In the hope of seeing as he would have me see, I read my Greek Testament every day. But it is not necessary to know Greek to see what Paul means by the so-translated adoption. You have only to consider his words with intent to find out his meaning, and without intent to find in them the teaching of this or that doctor of divinity. In the epistle to the Galatians, whose child does he speak of as adopted? It is the father’s own child, his heir, who differs nothing from a slave until he enters upon his true relation to his father—the full status of a son. So also, in another passage, by the same word he means the redemption of the body—its passing into the higher condition of outward things, into a condition in itself, and a home around it, fit for the sons and daughters of God—that we be no more like strangers, but like what we are, the children of the house. To use any word of Paul’s to make human being feel as if he were not by birth, making, origin, or whatever word of closer import can be found, the child of God, or as if anything he had done or could do could annul that relationship, is of the devil, the father of evil, not either of Paul or of Christ.—Why, my lady,” continued Donal, turning to Arctura, “all the evil lies in this—that he is our father and we are not his children. To fulfil the poorest necessities of our being, we must be his children in brain and heart, in body and soul and spirit, in obedience and hope and gladness and love—his out and out, beyond all that tongue can say, mind think, or heart desire. Then only is our creation finished—then only are we what we were made to be. This is that for the sake of which we are troubled on all sides.”
He ceased. Miss Carmichael was intellectually cowed, but her heart was nowise touched. She had never had that longing after closest relation with God which sends us feeling after the father. But now, taking courage under the overshadowing wing of the divine, Arctura spoke.
“I do hope what you say is true, Mr. Grant!” she said with a longing sigh.
“Oh yes, hope! we all hope! But it is the word we have to do with!” said Miss Carmichael.
“I have given you the truth of this word!” said Donal.
But as if she heard neither of them, Arctura went on,
“If it were but true!” she moaned. “It would set right everything on the face of the earth!”