Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/19

Rh One of the golden texts was a special favorite with Gilbert and Olga, and she would declaim it with great éclat, in a broad, free-verse style:

But sin, on the whole, was a very vague idea to Gilbert. He early learned that God had sent His Son Jesus down to earth to save us from our sins, and that this was the central fact of life. Garna told him about it, and so did Miss Fogg, when they later had lessons in the New Testament. We must all love God very much, and especially Jesus, who had done so much for us. And in the solemn Sunday afternoons, when Gilbert was told to take his Bible and sit by the window in the back-parlor and read a chapter, he would sometimes wonder if he loved God enough, or if he loved Jesus. God was a majestic old gentleman with a white beard, reclining on white cumulus clouds, and Jesus he knew equally well as a young man in an archaic blue robe, holding a lamb in one arm, and followed by others. He had seen their pictures long ago, and whenever either of them was mentioned, these images popped into his mind, faintly colored by a sense of awe, as in the case of God, and of tenderness, as in the case of Jesus. But did he love them? The pastor was certainly a very poor caricature of God, and yet with his beard and square head and loud words, there must be a faint resemblance. Gilbert certainly did not like him.

Much more nearly like God was his father's father, whom he had once been taken to see and whom he remembered now as a white-haired, white-bearded man, very solemn, and yet with something cold and repellent about him whenever Gilbert had touched him. Gilbert did not feel that he loved this God, and yet he knew that he ought to, that it was the most important thing in life that he could do. So he would sit there and try to screw his heart into an attitude of loving. He would grow very serious and tighten his muscles, and fix his thoughts on the majesty reclining on the white cloud, and, pretty soon, he would feel that indeed he now loved God, and he would be kept from sin. Jesus, who was tenderer, he might have found easier to love, but for the fact of those lambs. Gilbert had never seen