But she had her Bible, and, when that
troubled her, as it did not a little sometimes, she had the
Eternal Wisdom to cry to for such wisdom as she could receive;
and one of the things she learned was, that nowhere in the Bible
was she called on to believe in the Bible, but in the living God,
in whom is no darkness, and who alone can give light to
understand his own intent. All her troubles she carried to him.
It was not always the solitude of her room that Mary sought to
get out of the wind of the world. Her love of nature had been
growing stronger, notably, from her father's death. If the world
is God's, every true man ought to feel at home in it. Something
is wrong if the calm of the summer night does not sink into the
heart, for the peace of God is there embodied. Sometime is wrong
in the man to whom the sunrise is not a divine glory for therein
are embodied the truth, the simplicity, the might of the Maker.
When all is true in us, we shall feel the visible presence of the
Watchful and Loving; for the thing that he works is its sign and
symbol, its clothing fact. In the gentle conference of earth and
sky, in the witnessing colors of the west, in the wind that so
gently visited her cheek, in the great burst of a new morning,
Mary saw the sordid affairs of Mammon, to whose worship the shop
seemed to become more and more of a temple, sink to the bottom of
things, as the mud, which, during the day, the feet of the
drinking cattle have stirred, sinks in the silent night to the
bottom of the clear pool; and she saw that the sordid is all in
the soul, and not in the shop.
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