"We shall get out of it alive!—God's will be done!"
"Why do you say that? Don't you really mean we are going to be saved?"
"Would you want to live, if he wanted you to die?"
"Oh, but you forget, Mr. Ian, I am not ready to die, like you!" sobbed Christina.
"Do you think anything could make it better for you to stop here, after God thought it better for you to go?"
"I dare not think about it."
"Be sure God will not take you away, if it be better for you to live here a little longer. But you will have to go sometime; and if you contrived to live after God wanted you to go, you would find yourself much less ready when the time came that you must. But, my dear Miss Palmer, no one can be living a true life, to whom dying is a terror."
Christina was silent. He spoke the truth! She was not worth anything! How grand it was to look death in the face with a smile!
If she had been no more than the creature she had hitherto shown herself, not all the floods of the deluge could have made her think or feel thus: her real self, her divine nature had begun to wake. True, that nature was as yet no more like the divine, than the drowsy, arm-stretching, yawning child is like the merry elf about to spring from his couch, full of life, of play, of love. She had no faith in God yet, but it was much that she felt she was not worth anything.
You are right: it was odd to hold such a conversation at such a time! But Ian was an odd man. He actually believed that God was nearer to him than his own consciousness, yet desired communion with him! and that Jesus Christ knew what he said when he told his disciples that the Father cared for his sparrows.