CHAPTER XXXIII
“Hope evermore and believe, O man; for e’en as thy thought
So are the things that thou see’st; e’en as thy hope and belief.”
—Arthur Hugh Clough.
Janet worked out a new theory of life. For a time she had ceased to form opinions, and I had rejoiced in seeing her ideas driven like dead leaves before the first healthy emotion of her life. Now she drew herself together and deluded herself into the belief that she had a new philosophy.
“The trouble with us all is,” she remarked sententiously to me one day, “that we are always trying to convince God of our perfect intellectual clearness in matters religious, while all the time God, ‘if there be a God,’ knows perfectly well that we haven’t the means of getting it. He wants the kind of answer that we can give, not the kind that we cannot give.”
“And what is that?” I asked.
“Action,” she answered, “determination toward good, even when we cannot understand the whole scheme of things.”
I watched the girl’s quickly changing face with much admiration and with some amusement. Once she had mistaken her peculiar moods for speculative thought; now she was mistaking her thought of the Lad for a system of philosophy. She had translated her lover’s personality into ethics.
“We keep asking questions,” she went on, “and thinking that there will be an answer. I suppose that God wishes us to answer our own questions in deeds and not in words.”