You say such presumptuous things!" Cosmo laughed a little gentle laugh.
"How can you love God, Joan, and be afraid to speak before him?
I should no more dream of his being angry with me for thinking he made me for great and glad things, and was altogether generous towards me, than I could imagine my father angry with me for wishing to be as wise and as good as he is, when I know it is wise and good he most wants me to be." "Ah, but he is your father, you know, and that is very different!" "I know it is very different--God is so much, much more my father than is the laird of Glenwarlock! He is so much more to me, and so much nearer to me, though my father is the best father that ever lived! God, you know, Joan, God is more than anybody knows what to say about.

Sometimes, when I am lying in my bed at night, my heart swells and swells in me, that I hardly know how to bear it, with the thought that here I am, come out of God, and yet not OUT of him--close to the very life that said to everything BE, and it was! -- you think it strange that I talk so ?" "Rather, I must confess! I don't believe it can be a good thing at your age to think so much about religion.

There is a time for everything.

You talk like one of those good little children in books that always die--at least I have heard of such books--I never saw any of them." Cosmo laughed again.
"Which of us is the merrier--you or me?
Which of us is the stronger, Joan?
The moment I saw you, I thought you looked like one that hadn't enough of something--as if you weren't happy; but if you knew that the great beautiful person we call God, was always near you, it would be impossible for you to go on being sad." Joan gave a great sigh: her heart knew its own bitterness, and there was little joy in it for a stranger to intermeddle with.

But she said to herself the boy would be a gray-haired man before he was twenty, and began to imagine a mission to help him out of these morbid fancies.
"You must surely understand, Cosmo," she said, "that, while we are in this world, we must live as people of this world, not of another." "But you can't mean that the people of this world are banished from Him who put them in it! He is all the same, in this world and in every other.