These results in Robert were the
first outcome of divine facts and influences--they were the buds of
the fruit hereafter to be gathered in perfect devotion. God be
praised by those who know religion to be the truth of humanity--its
own truth that sets it free--not binds, and lops, and mutilates it!
who see God to be the father of every human soul--the ideal Father,
not an inventor of schemes, or the upholder of a court etiquette for
whose use he has chosen to desecrate the name of justice!
To return to Dr. Anderson. I have had little opportunity of knowing
his history in India. He returned from it half-way down the hill of
life, sad, gentle, kind, and rich. Whence his sadness came, we need
not inquire. Some woman out in that fervid land may have darkened
his story--darkened it wronglessly, it may be, with coldness, or
only with death. But to return home without wife to accompany him
or child to meet him,--to sit by his riches like a man over a fire
of straws in a Siberian frost; to know that old faces were gone and
old hearts changed, that the pattern of things in the heavens had
melted away from the face of the earth, that the chill evenings of
autumn were settling down into longer and longer nights, and that no
hope lay any more beyond the mountains--surely this was enough to
make a gentle-minded man sad, even if the individual sorrows of his
history had gathered into gold and purple in the west. I say west
advisedly.
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