"I will pray," whispered Annie.
"I, too," said Mrs. Godfrey, who was for the most part a silent listener in these discussions. "Strange it is, Eugene, that you should be teaching the principles which I ought to have instilled into you from youth upward."
"Why, you were not a Catholic, mother!" said Eugene.
"No! but I had many opportunities of becoming instructed, had I been willing; but I was worldly; I cared for none of these things; I did not think the time would come when I should consider sorrow and sickness a blessing: without that fearful malady and these paralyzed limbs I might have died in ignorance of all that it most concerns me to know. I have lived without God; dare I hope, Eugene, he will accept my tardy return to him now?"
"The grace that is working in your heart to make you wish that return is an evidence of his love for yon, dear mother; only continue to respond to it, and all will be well."
. . . . .
"Brother," said Annie, on another occasion, "the accounts that we have of the ancients soon after the deluge seem to denote that they were a race of wondrous power. The mere history we have of the building of the city of Babylon, its wondrous walls, its bricks so well cemented by bitumen that they seemed imperishable; its six hundred and seventy-six squares, so planned that they preserved the ventilation of the city in perfect order; its provision for water; its hanging gardens and palaces—to read of such cities as this and Nineveh and many others, one imagines a fairy tale in hand instead of realities. Then, I presume, the raising of those immense blocks of stone which go to form the Pyramids would puzzle our modern engineers, as would many things in that land of wonders, Egypt. Conceive a modern traveller losing his way among the ruins of ancient temples that strew the site where Thebes once stood, passing the night in the rude hut of a Bedouin or Copt erected amid these ruins, and in the morning seated upon a fallen pillar, making his meditation on 'Progression.' All ancient, very ancient history, is instinct with power. What does this mean?"
"That probably the knowledge that Adam imparted to his descendants was greater than that which we now possess, or the intellectual faculties may have been stronger before passion and egotism again corrupted the race."
"You think the earlier men really possessed higher intellectual facilities than we have now?"