Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1894-11-01
CHAPTER MI.


into Sandhurst. and Gwen was fast
growing up and imbibing religious in
struction in precisely the fashion one
might have expected from her sur
roundings and her turn of mind.
She received the facts as facts, and
got very keen and eager over those
that had any dramatic interest in
them. She dug into their depths and
reyeled in them as any other hoy or
girl of sound intellectual capacity
would do when they We're put as Mr.
Fellowes put them. The unsatisfactory
part of the business was when the hor-
rible critical faculty of the girl began
to ranSack the facts and the theories
hung on them. and to turn them in
side out, and to compare and classify
them with an honest downright I'M
scrupulousneSS that no girl sucked on
the Bible could ever, no matter what
her opinions might be. or rather her
own opinion of her opinions. find it
in her heart to use, and the summing
up of Owens searchings and compar-
| ings was monotonous and common
place enough.
THE whole scheme is very fine"
she said one day, sit is a perfect idyll
in its way, and divine from the mere
exaltation and grandeur of it. but
where any proof of a personal God
comes in l can't see, any more than in
any of the other creeds. They all
seem to be chips off the same block.
The ideal God seems universally hui
man-this Jewish one with the rest.
He is feeble and tyrannical and He.
i in the Old Testament, is so incon-
sistent; and il the New-well, after
that is only rather more modern
reflection of the Old. AS for Christ.
we know so little Of Him-and then
when all's said His loveliest and best
thoughts We're also thought in the We
das by the Brahmins. 1t is wonderful
beyond comprehension to me how SO
many have lived and died for such
myths. The greatest and divinest
quality of God seems to me to be His
ineXorableness. and even that failed
Him more than once at a pinch"
1T is a sense wanting in me-" she
often told Mr.. Fellowes; ''the sense of
religion, as in Dacre the sense of po-
etry, you can't supply it, no one can.
[ lose an infinite DEAL 1 know, your
face literally shining over these things
tells me so, palmer than a thousand
words. I would give anything to ex-
perience such rapture, which is itself
divine, but / couldn't to save my life
it's curiousr'
"Dacre tells me- she began sudden
ly another day, 'that he quite believes
in Christianity. Now, if his shallow
feeble acceptance of the thing-and he
says it is just like all the other fell
lows beliefs,-is accepted, average
Christianity must be poor stuff. 1 will
wait until l get a better hold on it
than that, before 1 say anything def
mite about believing or disbelieving.
l say merely, the scheme does not ap-
peal to me, the fault is in myself no
doubt, your judgment is sound in all
other things, I quite believe it is just
as sound in this"
On her seventeenth birthday, Mr.
and Mrs. Fellowes gave her an edition
of Browning.
'The parts she understands will be
a revelation to her." Mr.. Fellowes said,
land those she doesn't will serve as
a brain tonic, for she will be sure to
thresh them out with blood-curdling
thOroughness."
They were all this and more, as Mr.
Fellowes felt to his cost when a few
days later she brought him Caliban on
Cetebos.
"Now here she said. sis my exact
impression Of the Christian God. I
wonder if 1 shall ever change it, and
by what process? 1 must be in hor-
ribly unfinished initial state if l can
think side by side with brutal Great
ure like that. It's queer,-I am not
altogether like him in other respects"
she added with laugh.
To Be Continued.