Taylor before she went to bed. I remember
once going to her cot in the night, as she lay asleep, and almost
breaking my heart over her with remorse and thankfulness--remorse,
that I, with blundering stupidity, had judged her so superficially;
and thankfulness, that it had pleased God to present to me so much of
His own divinest grace. Fool that I was, not to be aware that
messages from Him are not to be read through the envelope in which
they are enclosed. I never should have believed, if it had not been
for Marie, that any grown-up man could so love a child. Such love, I
should have said, was only possible between man and woman, or,
perhaps, between man and man. But now I doubt whether a love of that
particular kind could be felt towards any grown-up human being, love
so pure, so imperious, so awful. My love to Marie was love of God
Himself as He is--an unrestrained adoration of an efflux from Him,
adoration transfigured into love, because the revelation had clothed
itself with a child's form. It was, as I say, the love of God as He
is. It was not necessary, as it so often is necessary, to qualify,
to subtract, to consider the other side, to deplore the obscurity or
the earthly contamination with which the Word is delivered to us.
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