THE DOCTOR'S HOUSE.


The holidays came, and Juliet took advantage of them to escape from what
had begun to be a bondage to her--the daily intercourse with people who
disapproved of the man she loved. In her thoughts even she took no
intellectual position against them with regard to what she called
doctrine, and Faber superstition. Her father had believed as they did;
she clung to his memory; perhaps she believed as he did; she could not
tell. There was time yet wherein to make up her mind. She had certainly
believed so once, she said to herself, and she might so believe again.
She would have been at first highly offended, but the next moment a
little pleased at being told that in reality she had never believed one
whit more than Faber, that she was at present indeed incapable of
believing. Probably she would have replied, "Then wherein am I to
blame?" But although a woman who sits with her child in her arms in the
midst of her burning house, half asleep, and half stifled and dazed with
the fierce smoke, may not be to blame, certainly the moment she is able
to excuse herself she is bound to make for the door. So long as men do
not feel that they are in a bad condition and in danger of worse, the
message of deliverance will sound to them as a threat. Yea, the offer of
absolute well-being upon the only possible conditions of the well-being
itself, must, if heard at all, rouse in them a discomfort whose cause
they attribute to the message, not to themselves; and immediately they
will endeavor to justify themselves in disregarding it. There are those
doing all they can to strengthen themselves in unbelief, who, if the
Lord were to appear plainly before their eyes, would tell Him they could
not help it, for He had not until then given them ground enough for
faith, and when He left them, would go on just as before, except that