"Granting that the story I have told you is true, how did his disciples know that he came to their help? Did not the hushed winds prove it? Did not the quieted waters prove it? Did not his presence with them assure them of it? By equal proof I know that he can and will come to the aid of those who look to him for aid. I have passed through darker nights and wilder storms than ever lowered over the Sea of Galilee, and I know by simple, practical, happy experience that Jesus Christ, through his all-pervading Spirit, has come to me in my utter extremity again and again, and that I have the same as felt his rescuing hand. Not that my trials and temptations have been greater than those of many others, but I have been weaker than others, and I have often been conscious of his sustaining power when otherwise I would have sunk beneath my burden. This is not a theory, Miss Amy, nor the infatuation of a few ignorant people. It is the downright experience of multitudes in every walk of life, and, on merely scientific grounds, is worth as much as any other experience. This story of Jesus gains the sympathy of little Bertha; it also commands the reverent belief of the most gifted and cultivated minds in the world."
"Oh, that I could believe all this; but there is so much mystery, so much that is dark." Then she glanced at her mother, who had turned away her face and seemed to be sleeping, and she asked: "If Christ is so strong to help and save, why is he not strong to prevent evil? Why is there a cry of agony going up from this stricken city? Why must father die who was everything to us? Why must mother suffer so? Why am I so shadowed by an awful fear? Life means so much to me. I love it," she continued in low yet passionate tones. "I love the song of birds, the breath of flowers, the sunlight, and every beautiful thing. I love sensation. I am not one who finds a tame and tranquil pleasure in the things I like or in the friends I love. My joys thrill every nerve and fibre of my being. I cling to them, I cannot give them up. A few days ago life was as full of rich promise to me as our tropical spring. It is still, though I will never cease to feel the pain of this great sorrow, and yet this horrible pit of death, corruption, and nothingness yawns at my very feet. Mr. Haldane," she said in a still lower and more shuddering tone, "I have a terrible presentiment that I shall perish with this loathsome disease. I may seem to you, who are so quiet and brave, very weak and cowardly; but I shrink from death with a dread which you cannot understand and which no language can express. It is repugnant to every instinct of my being, and I can think of it only with unutterable loathing. If I were old and feeble, if I had tasted all the joys of life, I might submit, but not now, not now. I feel with father that it is fiendish cruelty to give one such an intense love of life and then wrench it away; and, passionately as I love life, there is one far more dear. There is that in your nature which has so won my confidence that I can reveal to you my whole heart. Mr. Haldane, I love one who is like you, manly and noble, and dearly as I prize life, I think I could give it away in slow torture for his sake, if required. How often my heart has thrilled to see his eyes kindle with his foolish admiration, the infatuation of love which makes its object beautiful at least to the lover. And now to think that he does not know what I suffer and fear, to think that I may never see him again, to think that when he returns I may be a hideous mass of corruption that he cannot even approach. Out upon the phrases 'beneficent nature,' and 'natural law.' Laws which permit such things are must unnatural, and to endow one with such a love of life, such boundless capabilities of enjoying life, and then at the supreme moment when the loss will be most bitterly felt to snatch it away, looks to me more like the work of devilish ingenuity than of a 'beneficent nature.' I feel with father, it is fiendish cruelty."