Seaboard Parish, vol 1 | Page 5

a sly look up at me from under the drooping feather of her pretty hat.
"You know very well what I mean, you puss," I answered. "And I don't say one thing in the pulpit and another out of it."
She was at my horse's shoulder with a bound, as if Spry, her pony, had been of one mind and one piece with her. She was afraid she had offended me. She looked up into mine with as anxious a face as ever I saw upon Wynnie.
"O, thank you, papa!" she said when I smiled. "I thought I had been rude. I didn't mean it, indeed I didn't. But I do wish you would make it a little plainer to me. I do think about things sometimes, though you would hardly believe it."
"What do you want made plainer, my child?" I asked.
"When we're to think, and when we're not to think," she answered.
I remember all of this conversation because of what came so soon after.
"If the known duty of to-morrow depends on the work of to-day," I answered, "if it cannot be done right except you think about it and lay your plans for it, then that thought is to-day's business, not to-morrow's."
"Dear papa, some of your explanations are more difficult than the things themselves. May I be as impertinent as I like on my birthday?" she asked suddenly, again looking up in my face.
We were walking now, and she had a hold of my horse's mane, so as to keep her pony close up.
"Yes, my dear, as impertinent as you like--not an atom more, mind."
"Well, papa, I sometimes wish you wouldn't explain things so much. I seem to understand you all the time you are preaching, but when I try the text afterwards by myself, I can't make anything of it, and I've forgotten every word you said about it."
"Perhaps that is because you have no right to understand it."
"I thought all Protestants had a right to understand every word of the Bible," she returned.
"If they can," I rejoined. "But last Sunday, for instance, I did not expect anybody there to understand a certain bit of my sermon, except your mamma and Thomas Weir."
"How funny! What part of it was that?"
"O! I'm not going to tell you. You have no right to understand it. But most likely you thought you understood it perfectly, and it appeared to you, in consequence, very commonplace."
"In consequence of what?"
"In consequence of your thinking you understood it."
"O, papa dear! you're getting worse and worse. It's not often I ask you anything--and on my birthday too! It is really too bad of you to bewilder my poor little brains in this way."
"I will try to make you see what I mean, my pet. No talk about an idea that you never had in your head at all, can make you have that idea. If you had never seen a horse, no description even, not to say no amount of remark, would bring the figure of a horse before your mind. Much more is this the case with truths that belong to the convictions and feelings of the heart. Suppose a man had never in his life asked God for anything, or thanked God for anything, would his opinion as to what David meant in one of his worshipping psalms be worth much? The whole thing would be beyond him. If you have never known what it is to have care of any kind upon you, you cannot understand what our Lord means when he tells us to take no thought for the morrow."
"But indeed, papa, I am very full of care sometimes, though not perhaps about to-morrow precisely. But that does not matter, does it?"
"Certainly not. Tell me what you are full of care about, my child, and perhaps I can help you."
"You often say, papa, that half the misery in this world comes from idleness, and that you do not believe that in a world where God is at work every day, Sundays not excepted, it could have been intended that women any more than men should have nothing to do. Now what am I to do? What have I been sent into the world for? I don't see it; and I feel very useless and wrong sometimes."
"I do not think there is very much to complain of you in that respect, Connie. You, and your sister as well, help me very much in my parish. You take much off your mother's hands too. And you do a good deal for the poor. You teach your younger brothers and sister, and meantime you are learning yourselves."
"Yes, but that's not work."
"It is work. And it is the work that is given you to do at present. And you would do it much better if you were to