“Will ‘Dakie Thayne’ build a railroad,—­seven miles,—­across to Tillington,—­for our transportation?  We’ll say he will.  I have no question it is Dakie Thayne, or somebody, who is waiting, and that the right people are all linked together, ready to draw each other in,” said Mr. Kirkbright, giving rein to the very lightness of gladness in the joy of the thought he was pursuing.  “We don’t know how we stand leashed and looped, all over the world, until the Lord begins to take us in hand, and bring us together toward his grand intents.  We shall want another Hilary Vireo to preach that gospel here; and I don’t doubt he is somewhere, though it would hardly seem possible.”

“Why don’t we preach it ourselves?” said Desire, with inimitable unwittingness.  She was so utterly and wholly in the vision, that she left her present self standing there on the rock with Christopher Kirkbright, and never even thought of a reason why to blush before him.

“I don’t know why we shouldn’t.  In fact, we could not help it.  It would be all gospel, wouldn’t it?  I know, at least, what I should mean the whole thing to preach.”

Saying this, he fell silent all at once.

“There is a great deal of wrong gospel preached in the world.  If we could only stop that, and begin again,—­I think!” said Desire.  “Between the old, hopeless terrors and the modern smoothing away and letting go, the real living help seems to have failed men.  They don’t know where it is, or whether they need it, even.”

“Yes, that is it,” said Christopher Kirkbright, letting his silence be broken through with the whole tide of his earnest, life-long, pondered thought.  “Men have put aside the old idea of the avenging and punishing God, until they think they have no longer any need of Christ.  God is Love, they tell us; not recognizing that the Christ is that very Love of God.  He will not cast us into hell, they say; there is no pit of burning torment.  But they know there is something that follows after sin; they know that God is not weak, but abides by his own truth.  Therefore, when they have made out God to be Love, and blotted away the old, literal hell, they turn back and declare pitilessly,—­’There is Law.  Law punishes; and Law is inexorable.  God Himself does not suspend or contradict his Law.  You have sinned; you must take the consequences.’  Are you better off in the clutch of that Law, than you were in the old hell?  Isn’t there the same need as ever crying up from hearts of suffering men for a Saviour?  Of a side of God to be shown to them,—­the forgiving side, the restoring right hand?  The power to grasp and curb his own law?  You must have Jesus again!  You must have the Christ of God to help you against the Law of God that you have put in the place of the hell you will not believe in.  Without a counteracting force, law will run on forever.  The impetus that sin started will bear on downward, through the eternities!