keep my ways."

That we can say, for it has been said for us already. But beyond that we
can say, and need say, very little. We were not there, as we read in the
Book of Job, when God laid the foundations of the earth. "We see," says
St. Paul, "as in a glass darkly, and only know in part." "For who," he
asks again, "has known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His
counsellor? . . . For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all
things: to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen." Therefore we must
not rashly say, this or that is Why a thing has happened; nor invent what
are called "final causes," which are not Lady Why herself, but only our
little notions of what Lady Why has done, or rather what we should have
done if we had been in her place. It is not, indeed, by thinking that we
shall find out anything about Lady Why. She speaks not to our eyes or to
our brains, like Madam How, but to that inner part of us which we call
our hearts and spirits, and which will endure when eyes and brain are
turned again to dust. If your heart be pure and sober, gentle and
truthful, then Lady Why speaks to you without words, and tells you things
which Madam How and all her pupils, the men of science, can never tell.
When you lie, it may be, on a painful sick-bed, but with your mother's
hand in yours; when you sit by her, looking up into her loving eyes; when
you gaze out towards the setting sun, and fancy golden capes and islands
in the clouds, and seas and lakes in the blue sky, and the infinite rest
and peace of the far west sends rest and peace into your young heart,
till you sit silent and happy, you know not why; when sweet music fills
your heart with noble and tender instincts which need no thoughts or
words; ay, even when you watch the raging thunderstorm, and feel it to
be, in spite of its great awfulness, so beautiful that you cannot turn
your eyes away: at such times as these Lady Why is speaking to your soul
of souls, and saying, "My child, this world is a new place, and strange,