Then he went down to his grandmother, sadder and more desolate than
ever.
He found her seated in her usual place. Her New Testament, a
large-print octavo, lay on the table beside her unopened; for where
within those boards could she find comfort for a grief like hers?
That it was the will of God might well comfort any suffering of her
own, but would it comfort Andrew? and if there was no comfort for
Andrew, how was Andrew's mother to be comforted?
Yet God had given his first-born to save his brethren: how could he
be pleased that she should dry her tears and be comforted? True,
some awful unknown force of a necessity with which God could not
cope came in to explain it; but this did not make God more kind, for
he knew it all every time he made a man; nor man less sorrowful, for
God would have his very mother forget him, or, worse still, remember
him and be happy.
'Read a chapter till me, laddie,' she said.
Robert opened and read till he came to the words: 'I pray not for
the world.'
'He was o' the world,' said the old woman; 'and gin Christ wadna
pray for him, what for suld I?'
Already, so soon after her son's death, would her theology begin to
harden her heart. The strife which results from believing that the
higher love demands the suppression of the lower, is the most
fearful of all discords, the absolute love slaying love--the house
divided against itself; one moment all given up for the will of Him,
the next the human tenderness rushing back in a flood.
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