"He shall call upon me and I shall answer. I will deliver him in trouble. I will deliver him and honor him."
Had he ever really called on Him? Had Angela? Hadn't they been left in the slough of their own despond? Still Angela was not suited to him. Why did not God straighten that out? He didn't want to live with her.
He wandered through this philosophically, critically, until Mrs. Johns stopped. What, he asked himself, if, in spite of all his doubts, this seeming clamor and reality and pain and care were an illusion? Angela was suffering. So were many other people. How could this thing be true? Did not these facts exclude the possibility of illusion? Could they possibly be a part of it?
"Now we are going to try to realize that we are God's perfect children," she said, stopping and looking at him. "We think we are so big and strong and real. We are real enough, but only as a thought in God—that is all. No harm can happen to us there—no evil can come nigh us. For God is infinite, all power, all life. Truth, Love, over all, and all."
She closed her eyes and began, as she said, to try to realize for him the perfectness of his spirit in God. Eugene sat there trying to think of the Lord's prayer, but in reality thinking of the room, the cheap prints, the homely furniture, her ugliness, the curiousness of his being there. He, Eugene Witla, being prayed for! What would Angela think? Why was this woman old, if spirit could do all these other things? Why didn't she make herself beautiful? What was it she was doing now? Was this hypnotism, mesmerism, she was practicing? He remembered where Mrs. Eddy had especially said that these were not to be practiced—could not be in Science. No, she was no doubt sincere. She looked it—talked it. She believed in this beneficent spirit. Would it aid as the psalm said? Would it heal this ache? Would it make him not want Suzanne ever any more? Perhaps that was evil? Yes, no doubt it was. Still—— Perhaps he had better fix his mind on the Lord's Prayer. Divinity could aid him if it would. Certainly it could. No doubt of it. There was nothing impossible to this vast force ruling the universe. Look at the telephone, wireless telegraphy. How about the stars and sun? "He shall give his angels charge over thee."
"Now," said Mrs. Johns, after some fifteen minutes of silent meditation had passed and she opened her eyes smilingly—"we are going to see whether we are not going to be better. We are going to feel better, because we are going to do better, and because we are going to realize that nothing can hurt an idea in God. All the rest is illusions. It cannot hold us, for it is not real. Think good—God—and you are good. Think evil and you are evil, but it has no reality outside your own thought. Remember that." She talked to him as though he was a little child.
He went out into the snowy night where the wind was whirling the snow in picturesque whirls, buttoning his coat about him. The cars were running up Broadway as usual. Taxicabs were scuttling by. There were people forging their way through the snow, that ever-present company of a great city. There were arc lights burning clearly blue through the flying flakes. He wondered as he walked whether this would do him any good. Mrs. Eddy insisted that all these were unreal, he thought—that mortal mind had evolved something which was not in accord with spirit—mortal mind "a liar and the father of it," he recalled that quotation. Could it be so? Was evil unreal? Was misery only a belief? Could he come out of his sense of fear and shame and once more face the world? He boarded a car to go north. At Kingsbridge he made his way thoughtfully to his room. How could life ever be restored to him as it had been? He was really forty years of age. He sat down in his chair near his lamp and took up his book, "Science and Health," and opened it aimlessly. Then he thought for curiosity's sake he would see where he had opened it—what the particular page or paragraph his eye fell on had to say to him. He was still intensely superstitious. He looked, and here was this paragraph growing under his eyes:
"When mortal man blends his thoughts of existence with the spiritual, and works only as God works, he will no longer grope in the dark and cling to earth because he has not tasted heaven. Carnal beliefs defraud us. They make man an involuntary hypocrite—producing evil when he would create good, forming deformity when he would outline grace and beauty, injuring those whom he would bless. He becomes a general mis-creator, who believes he is a semi-God. His touch turns hope to dust, the dust we all have trod. He might say in Bible language, 'The good that I would, I do not, but evil, which I would not, I do.'"
He closed the book and meditated. He wished he might realize this thing if this were so. Still he did not want to become a religionist—a religious enthusiast. How silly they were. He picked up his daily paper—the Evening Post—and there on an inside page quoted in an obscure corner was a passage from a poem by the late Francis Thompson, entitled "The Hound of Heaven." It began:
"I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years ...