they would speculate and pride themselves on the vision. If men say, "We
want no such deliverance," then the Maker of them must either destroy
them as vile things for whose existence He is to Himself accountable, or
compel them to change. If they say, "We choose to be destroyed," He, as
their Maker, has a choice in the matter too. Is He not free to say, "You
can not even slay yourselves, and I choose that you shall know the
death of living without Me; you shall learn to choose to live indeed. I
choose that you shall know what _I know_ to be good"? And however much
any individual consciousness may rebel, surely the individual
consciousness which called that other into being, and is the Father of
that being, fit to be such because of Himself He is such, has a right to
object that by rebellion His creature should destroy the very power by
which it rebels, and from a being capable of a divine freedom by
partaking of the divine nature, should make of itself the merest slave
incapable of will of any sort! Is it a wrong to compel His creature to
soar aloft into the ether of its origin, and find its deepest, its only
true self? It is God's knowing choice of life against man's ignorant
choice of death.

But Juliet knew nothing of such a region of strife in the human soul.
She had no suspicion what an awful swamp lay around the prison of her
self-content--no, self-discontent--in which she lay chained. To her the
one good and desirable thing was the love and company of Paul Faber. He
was her saviour, she said to herself, and the woman who could not love
and trust and lean upon such a heart of devotion and unselfishness as
his, was unworthy of the smallest of his thoughts. He was nobility,
generosity, justice itself! If she sought to lay her faults bare to him,
he would but fold her to his bosom to shut them out from her own vision!
He would but lay his hand on the lips of confession, and silence them as
unbelievers in his perfect affection! He was better than the God the