"The notions you gathered of God from other people, must have come out
of their hearts, father?"

"Out of somebody's heart?"

"Just so," answered Dorothy.

"Go on, my child," said her father. "Let me understand clearly your
drift."

"I have heard Mr. Wingfold say," returned Dorothy, "that however men may
have been driven to form their ideas of God before Christ came, no man
can, with thorough honesty, take the name of a Christian, whose ideas of
the Father of men are gathered from any other field than the life,
thought, words, deeds, of the only Son of that Father. He says it is not
from the Bible as a book that we are to draw our ideas of God, but from
the living Man into whose presence that book brings us, Who is alive
now, and gives His spirit that they who read about Him may understand
what kind of being He is, and why He did as He did, and know Him, in
some possible measure, as He knows Himself.--I can only repeat the
lesson like a child."

"I suspect," returned the minister, "that I have been greatly astray.
But after this, we will seek our Father together, in our Brother, Jesus
Christ."

It was the initiation of a daily lesson together in the New Testament,
which, while it drew their hearts closer to each other, drew them, with
growing delight, nearer and nearer to the ideal of humanity, Jesus
Christ, in whom shines the glory of its Father.