Fleda met his eye again, without speaking; but her look had, perhaps, more than half revealed her thought, for she was answered with a smile so intelligent and sympathetic, that she was abashed.
"How very much religion heightens the enjoyments of life!" Mr.
Carleton said, after a while.
Fleda's heart throbbed an answer she did not speak.
"Both in its direct and indirect action. The mind is set free from influences that narrowed its range and dimmed its vision, and refined to a keener sensibility, a juster perception, a higher power of appreciation, by far, than it had before. And then, to say nothing of religion's own peculiar sphere of enjoyment, technically religious what a field of pleasure it opens to its possessor in the world of moral beauty, most partially known to any other and the fine but exquisite analogies of things material with things spiritual those harmonies of Nature, to which, talk as they will, all other ears are deaf."
"You know," said Fleda, with full eyes that she dared not show, "how Henry Martyn said that he found he enjoyed painting and music so much more after he became a Christian."
"I remember. It is the substituting a just medium for a false one it is putting nature within and nature without in tune with each other, so that the chords are perfect now which were jarring before."
"And yet how far people would be from believing you, Mr.
Carleton."
"Yes, they are possessed with the contrary notion. But in all the creation nothing has a one-sided usefulness. What a reflection it would be upon the wisdom of its Author, if godliness alone were the exception if it were not 'profitable for the life that now is, as well as for that which is to come!' "
"They make that work the other way, don't they?" said Fleda; "not being able to see how thorough religion should be for anybody's happiness, they make use of your argument to conclude that it is not what the Bible requires. How I have heard that urged that God intended his creatures to be happy as a reason why they should disobey him! They lay hold on the wrong end of the argument, and work backwards."
"Precisely.