[phpxmlrpc-devel] her father that s

[Esera <ha...@oz...>]

Me pungent odor of death and life in one which had endured all day came
in her nostrils. She seemed to sense heaven and earth and herself as an
atom, but an atom racked with infinite pain between the two. "There is
the great polar star," she said to herself, "there are all the suns and
stars, here is the earth, and here am I, Maria Edgham, who am on the
earth, but must some day give up my mortal life and become a part of it,
and part of the material universe and perhaps also of the spiritual. I
am as nothing, and yet this pain in my heart, this love in my heart,
makes me shine with my own fire as much as the star. I could not be
unless the earth existed, but it is of such as myself that the earth is
made up, and without such as myself it could not shine in its place in
the heavens." Maria began to attach a certain importance to her
individual existence even while she realized the pettiness of it,
comparatively speaking. She was an infinitesimal part, but the whole
could not be without that part. Suddenly the religious instruction which
she had drank in with her mother's milk took possession of her, but she
had a breadth of outlook which would have terrified her mother. Maria
said to herself that she believed in God, but that His need of her was
as much as her need of Him. She said to herself that without her tiny
faith in Him, her tiny speck of love for Him, He would lack something of
Himself. Then all at once, in a perfect flood of rapture, something
which she had never before known came into her heart: the consciousness
of the love of God for herself, of the need of God for herself, poor
little Maria Edgham, whose ways of life had been so untoward and so
absurd that she almost seemed to herself something to be laughed at
rather than pitied, much less loved. But all at once the knowledge of
the love of God was over her. She gazed up again at the great polar star
overlooking with its eternal light the mysteries of the north, and for
the first time in her whole life the primitive instinct of worship
assert