But then he had been but a boy all the time, and a very good sort of boy.

He had acted in no small measure according to the light he had, and time was of course given him to grow in.

It is not the world alone that requires the fullness of its time to come, ere it can receive a revelation; the individual also has to pass through his various stages of Pagan, Guebre, Moslem, Jew, Essene--God knows what all--before he can begin to see and understand the living Christ.

The child has to pass through all the phases of lower animal life; when, change is arrested, he is born a monster; and in many a Christian the rudiments of former stages are far from extinct--not seldom revive, and for the time seem to reabsorb the development, making indeed a monstrous show.
"For myself,"-- I give a passage from Wingfold's note-book, written for his wife's reading--"I feel sometimes as if I were yet a pagan, struggling hard to break through where I see a glimmer of something better, called Christianity.

In any case what I have, can be but a foretaste of what I have yet to _be_; and if so, then indeed is there a glory laid up for them that will have God, the _I_ of their _I_, to throne it in the temple he has built, to pervade the life he has _lifed_ out of himself.