Miss Kirkbright and her brother went into the minister’s pew.  Miss Kirkbright did not usually come to the service; the school, in which she taught, met in the afternoon; but this was Mr. Vireo’s first Sunday, and his friend, her brother Christopher, had just come home with him across the Atlantic.

There was singing, in which nearly every voice joined; there was praying, in which one voice spoke as to a Presence felt close beside; and all the people felt at least that he felt it, and that therefore it must be there.  They believed in it through him, as we all believe in it through Christ, who is in the bosom of the Father.  That they might some time come where he stood now, and know as he knew, many of them were simply, carefully, daily striving to “do the Will.”

He spoke to them of “journeyings;” of how God was everywhere in the whole earth; of how Abraham had the Lord with him, as he travelled up through a land he knew not, as he dwelt in Padan Aram, as he crossed the desert and came down through the hill-country into Canaan.  Of how the Lord met Jacob at Bethel, when he was on his way through strange places, to go and serve his uncle Laban; how he went with Joseph into Egypt, and afterwards led out the children of Israel through forty years of wandering, showing them signs, and comforting them all the way; how “He leadeth me” is still the believer’s song, still the heart-meaning of every human life.

“Whether we go or stay, as to place, we all move on; from our Mondays to our Saturdays; from one experience to another; and before us and beside us, passes always and abides near that presence of the Lord.  Do you know what ‘the Lord’ means?  It is the bread-giver; the feeder; the provider of every little thing.  That is the name of God when He comes close to humanity.  In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth; but the Lord spoke unto Adam; the Lord appeared unto Abraham; the Lord was the God of Israel.

“God is our Lord; our daily leader; our bread-giver, from meal to meal, from mouthful to mouthful.  The Angel of his Presence saves us continually.  And in these latter days, the ‘Lord’ is ‘Christ;’ the human love of Him come down into our souls, to take away our sins,—­to give us bread from heaven to eat; to fulfill in the inward kingdom every type and sign of the old leading; through need and toil, through strange places, through tedious waitings, through the long wilderness, and over the river into the Land that is beautiful and very far off.”

The four walked away from the church together; they stopped on the corner of Borden Street.  Here Desire and Mr. Vireo would leave them,—­their way lying down the hill.

“I liked your doctrine of the Lord,” said Miss Euphrasia to the minister.  “That is true New Church interpretation, as I receive it.”

“How can any one help seeing it?  It shines so through the whole,” said Desire.