"Tressor reads about Christ, but my father knows Him. He is more real to my father, Manning, than I am."
The curious look died out of Manning's face, but an affectionate ring crept into his voice. "Lord, Paul, you're a rum ass, you know," he said, "but you are rather an interesting one."
Paul was due at Dick Hartley's for tea, and as soon as they had landed, he rushed round to his friend. It was odd, he thought as he went, how one suddenly saw things, by some curious indefinable process, which one had known, one thought, for years. After all, he had preached on the Blind Beggar in St. John's Gospel a score of times one way and another, yet he had never really understood it until this afternoon. He had "known" Christ ever since he could well remember, but somehow it was the Christ of the printed page that he had known. Alive to-day, yes, but not alive in such a way that His living actually solved intellectual doubts. To Paul, the Cambridge streets had suddenly become the streets of a New Jerusalem. From old gables to modern shop-fronts, they had all at once become intimate and tender. He thought, even as he ran, that just as he had come to dwell tenderly on a mental image of Edward Street because Edith lived, moved, and had association there, so now the whole world was transfigured before him. Christ moved in it, and he knew Christ.
He rattled up the wooden stairs to his friend's room and burst in almost without knocking. Dick was reading in an arm-chair and a kettle hissed on the hob. He looked up from his book.
"Heavens! What's the matter?" he asked, smiling.
Paul slowed down, shut the door, and came over to the fire, his face shining. "I say, Dick," he said, "do you realise what it means that we know Christ?"
The older man stared, as well he might have done. Then a rather envious expression crept into his face. Wistfulness was scarcely what one thought of in connection with matter-of-fact, athletic, sober-minded Dick Hartley, but it was there at that moment.
"Ah," he said shortly, and was silent.
"Of course I thought I did," poured out Paul excitedly, walking up and down, "but I begin to think I never have till this afternoon. I see, now, what's the matter with Tressor and Manning and all the rest of them. They think Christ is a story out of a book, Dick. Even I" (all innocent of self-righteous priggishness was Paul), "even I thought of Him only as emotionally alive, so to speak. But He lives, Dick, He lives! We know Him! We aren't worried by criticism or any of their intellectual doubts, because we know Him. Don't you see?"
Dick closed Harnack's Acts of the Apostles and put it on one side. "You have a great gift of faith, Paul," he said.