"Sin?"
"Yes," said Dr. Lavendar, cheerfully; "have you ever noticed that
every single human experience--except, perhaps, the stagnation of
conceit; I haven't found anything hopeful in that yet; but maybe I
shall some day!--but, except for conceit, I have never known any human
experience of pain or sin that could not be the gate of heaven. Mind!
I don't say that it always is; but it can be. Has that ever occurred
to you?"
"Well, no," the doctor confessed; "I can't say that it has."
"Oh, you're young yet," Dr, Lavendar said encouragingly, "My boy, let
me tell you that there are some good folks who don't begin to know
their Heavenly Father, as the sinner does who climbed up to Him out of
the gutter."
"A dangerous doctrine," William ruminated.
"Oh, I don't preach it," Dr. Lavendar said placidly "but I don't
preach everything I know."
William was not following him. He said abruptly, "What are you going
to do with David?"
"David is going to stay with me."
And William said again, "It will break her heart!"
"I hope so," said Dr. Lavendar solemnly, How he watched that poor
heart, in the next few days! Every afternoon his shabby old buggy went
tugging up the hill. Sometimes he found her walking restlessly about
in the frosted garden; sometimes standing mutely at the long window in
the parlor, looking for him; sometimes prostrate on her bed. When he
took her hand--listless one day, fiercely despairing the next,--he
would glance at her with a swift scrutiny that questioned, and then
waited. The pity in his old eyes never dimmed their relentless
keenness; they seemed to raid her face, sounding all the shallows in
search of depths. For with his exultant faith in human nature, he
believed that somewhere in the depths he should find God, It is only
the pure in heart who can find Him in impurity, who can see, behind
the murky veil of stained flesh, the very face of Christ declaring the
possibilities of the flesh!--but this old man sought and knew that he
should find Him. He waited and watched for many days, looking for that
recognition of wrong-doing which breaks the heart by its revelation of
goodness that might have been; for there is no true knowledge of sin,
without a divine and redeeming knowledge of righteousness! So, as this
old saint looked into the breaking heart, pity for the sinner who was
base deepened into reverence for the child of God who might be noble.
It is an easy matter to believe in the confident soul; but Dr.
Lavendar believed in a soul that did not believe in itself!