“What then makes her so considerate?”
“It’s only that I’ve managed to make her afraid of me.”
CHAPTER XXX. WORKADAY MOLLY.
The days passed; week after week went down the hill—or, is it not rather, up the hill?—and out of sight; the moon kept on changelessly changing; and at length Walter was well, though rather thin and white.
Molly saw that he was beginning to brood. She saw also, as clearly as if he had opened his mind to her, what troubled him: it needed no witch to divine that! he must work: what was his work to be?
Whatever he do, if he be not called to it, a man but takes it up “at his own hand, as the devil did sinning.”
Molly was one of the wise women of the world—and thus: thoughts grew for her first out of things, and not things out of thoughts. God’s things come out of His thoughts; our realities are God’s thoughts made manifest in things; and out of them our thoughts must come; then the things that come out of our thoughts will be real. Neither our own fancies, nor the judgments of the world, must be the ground of our theories or behavior. This, at least, was Molly’s working theory of life. She saw plainly that her business, every day, hour, moment, was to order her way as He who had sent her into being would have her order her way; doing God’s things, God’s thoughts would come to her; God’s things were better than man’s thoughts; man’s best thoughts the discovery of the thoughts hidden in God’s things? Obeying him, perhaps a day would come in which God would think directly into the mind of His child, without the intervention of things! [Footnote: It may interest some of my readers to be told that I had got thus far in preparation for this volume, when I took a book from the floor, shaken with hundreds beside from my shelves by an earthquake the same morning, and opening it—it was a life of Lavater which I had not known I possessed—found these words written by him on a card, for a friend to read after his death: “Act according to thy faith in Christ, and thy faith will soon become sight.”]
For Molly had made the one rational, one practical discovery, that life is to be lived, not by helpless assent or aimless drifting, but by active co-operation with the Life that has said “Live.” To her everything was part of a whole, which, with its parts, she was learning to know, was finding out, by obedience to what she already knew. There is nothing for developing even the common intellect like obedience, that is, duty done. Those who obey are soon wiser than all their lessons; while from those who do not, will be taken away even what knowledge they started with.
Molly was not prepared to attempt convincing Walter, who was so much more learned and clever than she, that the things that rose in men’s minds even in their best moods were not necessarily a valuable commodity, but that their character depended on the soil whence they sprung. She believed, however, that she had it in her power to make him doubt his judgment in regard to the work of other people, and that might lead him to doubt his judgment of himself, and the thoughts he made so much of.