in it and enjoying the pleasures of life that came in their way. Gortre was not one of those narrow, and even ill-bred, young priests with a text for ever on his lips, a sort of inopportune concordance, with an unpleasant flavour of omniscience. His religion and Helena's was too deep and fibrous a thing for commonplaces about it. It did not continually effervesce within and break forth in minute and constant bubbles, losing all its sincerity and beauty by the vulgar wear and tear of a verbal trick.
But it was always and for ever with him a transmuting force which changed his life each hour in a way of which the nominal believer has no conception.
A letter he had once written to Helena during a holiday compressed all his belief, and his joy in his belief, into a few short lines. Thus had run the sincere and simple statement, unadorned by any effort of literary grace to give it point and force: —
"Day by day as your letters come I go on saying my prayers for you, and with you, in fresh faith and confidence. You know that I absolutely trust the Lord Jesus Christ, who is, I believe, the God who made the worlds, and that I pray to Him continually, relying on His promises.
"I keep on reading all sides of the question, as your father does also, and while admitting all that honest criticism and sincere intellectual doubt can teach me, and freely conceding that there is no infallible record in the New Testament, I grow more and more convinced that the Gospels and Paul's letters relate facts and not imaginations or hallucinations. And the more strongly my intellect is convinced, so much more does my heart delight in the love of God, who has given Himself for me. How magnificent is that finale of St. John's Gospel! 'Thomas saith unto Him, My Lord and my God.'
