Thomas Wingfold. Volume II by George MacDonald

As Wingfold walked home that afternoon, he thought much of what he / had heard and seen. "If there be a God," he said to himself, "then / all is well, for certainly he would not give being to such a woman, / and then throw her aside as a failure, and forget her. It is strange / to see, though, how he permits his work to be thwarted. To be the / perfect God notwithstanding, he must be able to turn the very / thwarting to higher furtherance. Don't we see something of the sort / in life -- the vigorous nursed by the arduous? Is it presumptuous to / imagine God saying to Rachel: 'Trust me, and bear, and I will do / better for thee than thou canst think? ' Certainly the one who most / needs the comfort of such a faith, in this case HAS it. I wish I / could be as sure of him as Rachel Polwarth! -- But then," he added, / smiling to himself, "she has had her crooked spine to help her! It / seems as if nothing less than the spiritual beholding of the Eternal / will produce at least absolute belief. And till then what better or / indeed other proof can the less receive of the presence of the / greater than the expansion of its own being under the influences of / that greater? But my plague now is that the ideas of religion are so / grand, and the things all around it in life so common-place, that / they give the lie to each other from morning to night -- in my mind, I / mean.

Which is the true? a loving, caring father, or the grinding of / cruel poverty and the naked exposure to heedless chance? How is it / that, while the former seems the only right, reasonable, and / all-sufficing thing, it should yet come more naturally to believe in / the latter? And yet, when I think of it, I never did come closer to / believing in the latter than is indicated by terror of its possible / truth -- so many things looked like it. -- Then, what has nature in / common with the Bible and its metaphysics? -- There I am wrong -- she / has a thousand things. The very wind on my face seems to rouse me to / fresh effort after a pure healthy life! Then there is the sunrise! / There is the snowdrop in the snow! There is the butterfly! There is / the rain of summer, and the clearing of the sky after a storm! There / is the hen gathering her chickens under her wing! -- I begin to doubt / whether there be the common-place anywhere except in our own / mistrusting nature, that will cast no care upon the Unseen. It is / with me, in regard to my better life, as it was with the disciples / in regard to their bodily life, when they were for the time rendered / incapable of understanding the words of our Lord by having forgotten / to take bread in the boat: they were so afraid of being hungry that / they could think of nothing but bread."