"But," said I doubtfully, "I had questioned what was right; at
least I had not been certain that I ought to do anything just
now."
"Of course I am speaking in the dark," he answered. "But you
can judge whether this matter of division is something that in
your father's place you would feel you had a right to know."
I mused so long after this speech, that I am sure Mr.
Dinwiddie must have felt that he had touched my difficulty. He
was perfectly silent. At last I rose up to go home. I do not
know what Mr. Dinwiddie saw in me, but he stopped me and took
my hand.
"Can't you trust the Lord?" he said.
"I see trouble before me, whatever I do," I said with some
difficulty.
"Very well," he said; "even so, trust the Lord. The trouble
will do you no harm."
I sat down for a moment and covered my face. It might do me no
harm; it might at the same time separate me from what I loved
best in the world.
"Cannot you trust?" he repeated. " 'He that putteth his trust
in the Lord shall be made fat.' "
"You know," I said, getting up, "one cannot help being weak."
"Will you excuse me? - That is precisely what we can help. We
cannot help being ignorant sometimes, - foolish sometimes, -
short-sighted. But weak we need not be; for 'in the Lord
Jehovah is everlasting strength;' and 'he giveth power to the
faint.' "
"But there is no perfection, Mr. Dinwiddie."
"Not if by perfection you mean, standing alone. But if the
power that holds us up is perfect, - what should hinder our
having a fulness of that? 'If ye shall ask anything in My
name, I will do it.' Isn't that promise good for all we want
to ask?"
I sat down again to think. Mr. Dinwiddie quietly took his
place by my side; and we were still for a good while. The
plains of Jericho and the Jordan and the Moab mountains and
the Quarantania, all seemed to have new voices for me now;
voices full of balm; messages of soft-healing. I do think the
messages God sends to us by natural things are some of the
sweetest and mightiest and best understood of all. They come
home.
"Do you think," I asked, after a long silence, "that this
mountain was really the scene of the Temptation?"
"Why should we think so? No, I do not think it."
"But the road from Jericho to Jerusalem - there is no doubt of
that?"
"No doubt at all. We are often sure of the roads here, when we
are sure of little else."
There was a pause; and then Mr. Dinwiddie broke it.
"You left things in confusion at home. How do you feel about
that?"