"Will you excuse me? - That is precisely what we _can_ help. We cannot help being ignorant sometimes, - foolish sometimes, - short-sighted. But weak we need not be; for 'in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength;' and 'he giveth power to the faint.' "
"But there is no perfection, Mr. Dinwiddie."
"Not if by perfection you mean, standing alone. But if the power that holds us up is perfect, - what should hinder our having a fulness of that? 'If ye shall ask anything in My name, I will do it.' Isn't that promise good for all we want to ask?"
I sat down again to think. Mr. Dinwiddie quietly took his place by my side; and we were still for a good while. The plains of Jericho and the Jordan and the Moab mountains and the Quarantania, all seemed to have new voices for me now; voices full of balm; messages of soft-healing. I do think the messages God sends to us by natural things are some of the sweetest and mightiest and best understood of all. They come home.
"Do you think," I asked, after a long silence, "that this mountain was really the scene of the Temptation?"
"Why should we think so? No, I do not think it."
"But the road from Jericho to Jerusalem - there is no doubt of that?"
"No doubt at all. We are often sure of the roads here, when we are sure of little else."
There was a pause; and then Mr. Dinwiddie broke it.
"You left things in confusion at home. How do you feel about that?"
"At home in America?" I said. "I do not feel about it as my parents do."
"I have lived there so much. I know the view taken there; and it seems to me the right one. And I have lived at the South too; and I do not like the view held there, - nor the practice followed."
"There are some things I can fancy you would not like," he said musingly. "I have not known what to think. It seems to me they have made a false move. But it seems to me they must succeed."
He looked at me a little hard, and then we left the hermits' caves and went down the plain to our encampment.
The spot where our tents were pitched commands a view, I think one of the loveliest in the world. Perhaps with me association has something to do with the feeling. That broad sweep of the plains of Jericho, bright with their groves of Zizyphus trees; the lake waters coming in at the south; the great line of the Moab horizon, and the heights of the western shore; and then the constant changes which the light makes in revealing all these; I found it a study of beauty, from the morning till the night. From the time when the sun rose over the Moab mountains and brightened our dôm trees and kissed our spring, to the evening when the shadow of Quarantania stretched over all our neighbourhood, as it stretched over Jericho of old, and the distant hills and waters and thickets glowed in colours and lights of their own.