“If the known duty of to-morrow depends on the work of to-day,” I answered, “if it cannot be done right except you think about it and lay your plans for it, then that thought is to-day’s business, not to-morrow’s.”
“Dear papa, some of your explanations are more difficult than the things themselves. May I be as impertinent as I like on my birthday?” she asked suddenly, again looking up in my face.
We were walking now, and she had a hold of my horse’s mane, so as to keep her pony close up.
“Yes, my dear, as impertinent as you like—not an atom more, mind.”
“Well, papa, I sometimes wish you wouldn’t explain things so much. I seem to understand you all the time you are preaching, but when I try the text afterwards by myself, I can’t make anything of it, and I’ve forgotten every word you said about it.”
“Perhaps that is because you have no right to understand it.”
“I thought all Protestants had a right to understand every word of the Bible,” she returned.
“If they can,” I rejoined. “But last Sunday, for instance, I did not expect anybody there to understand a certain bit of my sermon, except your mamma and Thomas Weir.”
“How funny! What part of it was that?”
“O! I’m not going to tell you. You have no right to understand it. But most likely you thought you understood it perfectly, and it appeared to you, in consequence, very commonplace.”