“Keep your right hand to serve God with, Louis,” was the reply. “If you were more likely to believe without it than with it, He Himself would take it from you.”
“I don’t think I am likely to believe either way,” was the boy’s reply. “You see, my father taught me to imitate Christ, to be a little Christ-child, as he called it, yet to think Christianity itself only a fairy tale. And I can’t get over the habit,” he added; “I can’t think of Christ as alive now, or believe that He is God. To me He is dead as King Arthur and Washington and Barbarossa are dead.”
“And when you wish to believe Him alive, is it that you may serve Him better, or that you may possess the happiness in the perpetual consciousness of His presence which others enjoy?” asked the clergyman, smiling tenderly upon the wistful face upturned to him.
“The last, of course,” returned Louis honestly, “though perhaps I could serve Him better, if you mean working for others,” he added.
Mr. Clare smiled. “Leave the better service to Him; He knows what He wants from you,” he said. “For the rest, Prince Louis, are you following out your father’s teaching in asking or wishing any thing for yourself? Is that like Jesus Christ, who pleased not Himself?”
“Then what must I do?”
“Do what you believe,” said Mr. Clare. “In fact, neither you nor any of us can do otherwise. What we believe, that will we do; nothing else. What we do not show in our lives, we do not yet entirely believe. There is no escape from that logic, Louis, terrible though it be.” He paused, hesitated, then went on with a smile. “For I have just shown you that you have not been living up to what faith you have, which is, after all, not a little. Therefore, you see, it fails just so far of being a real faith, and you cannot ask for more until you have made the most of what you already have. Only go on working, not thinking at all of yourself, living for others, and some day—if not in this world, at least in the next—your eyes will be opened like those of the disciples at Emmaus, and you will say, ‘Did not my heart burn within me, while He talked with me by the way?’”
“In the next world!” said Louis thoughtfully. “But if there be no other world, Mr. Clare?”
“Ah! my boy, that you must be content to take—yet a while—on trust. When your eyes see the King in His beauty, the land that is very far off will become a reality to you; not until. The best—I was about to say the sole—argument for immortality is my text of this morning: ‘Because He lives, we shall live also.’ ‘And this is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.’”
“I’m like Dr. Richards,” said Louis, smiling sadly. “You don’t touch my spiritual optic nerve. But I am glad you tell me to do, Mr. Clare, for I want to believe, and cannot. Yet the Herr Pastor told me once,” he continued, smiling, “not to put my trust in anything that I did, for that my righteousness was as filthy rags, and that I must believe in order to be saved.”