The dinner was, per se, a success. The table was elegant with glass, silver, and flowers; the viands were the creation of one of those round, greasy Africanesses, who are born to the gridiron not less indubitably than a poet to the lyre; and white-haired old Sancho waited with a blending of obsequiousness and pomposity, wonderful to behold. There were neither culinary failures to harrow the soul of the hostess, nor glass-fractures or sauce-spillings to disconcert her guests.
The conversation was bright, easy, and desultory, as well as interlocutory and general by turns, as dinner-table talk should be. Only once, and that quite at the last, did it take a graver turn than was well suited to the occasion, or seem to stir any ill-feeling. In a pause of the more general conversation, Doctor Remy was heard saying to Carice, who sat next him;—
"You are fortunate in being able to believe so implicitly, without ampler proof."
"Do you think the proof insufficient, then?" asked Carice, with a little look of wonder in her blue eyes.
"To some minds," answered Doctor Remy, evasively.
"Perhaps," interposed Mr. Islay, whose ears had been open for some moments toward this conversation,—"perhaps such minds find the proof insufficient only because they have not yet been able to look at it in the right light."
"What light do you mean?" asked Doctor Remy, a little doubtfully.
"The light of a renewed heart and an obedient life. No man apprehends the truths of Christianity clearly, nor believes them with a belief that is worth anything, until he feels his own personal need of them. When that time comes, he catches hold of them, without proof, as it were,—or, at least, without other proof than their felt adaptation to that intense need,—-just as a man who is hungry and thirsty accepts convenient food without troubling himself about its chemical analysis. Then, holding them fast, and feeling how perfectly they meet his wants, what strength and satisfaction they give to his mind, and what symmetry and dignity they impart to his life, he begins to look back over the long line of prophecy and testimony for proof, and finds it ample. Men are prone to forget, Dr. Remy, that the natural order—as we see in children—is through the heart to the intellect, not through the intellect to the heart."
"But," objected Doctor Remy, "if a man is not sensible of any such personal need, how is he to be made to feel it?"
"Who can tell?" responded Mr. Islay, solemnly. "If the eye sees no comeliness in Christ, to desire Him, if the heart feels no void which craves His fulness, no pang which needs His healing, who can tell when the one will be opened, the other emptied or smitten? 'The wind bloweth where it listeth.' But I can tell you, Doctor Remy, how a man can postpone the time of conviction to the last moment, perhaps to the very end."