From this time for several weeks Katherine was greatly occupied in the benevolent undertakings of her new friend. The endless need, the degradations of extreme poverty, the hopeless condition of such masses of her fellow-creatures, depressed her beyond description. She would gladly have given to her uttermost farthing, but it would be a mere drop in the ocean of misery around.
"Even if we could supply their every want, and give each family a decent home," she said to Bertie one evening as she walked back with him, "they would not know how to keep it or to enjoy it. If the men, and the women too, have not the tremendous necessity to labor that they may live, they relax and become mere brutes. We must, above all things, educate them."
"Yes, education is certainly necessary; but the most ignorant being who has laid hold on the Rock of Ages, who has received the spirit of adoption whereby he can cry, 'Abba, Father!' has a means of elevation and refinement beyond all that books and art can teach," cried Bertie, with more warmth than he usually allowed himself to show.
"You believe that? I cannot say I do. We need other means of moral and intellectual life besides spiritualism. At least I have tried to be religious, but I always get weary."
"That is only because you have not found the straight and true road," said Bertie, earnestly. "Pray, my dear Miss Liddell--pray, and light will be given you."
"Thank you--you are very good," murmured Katherine "At all events, though we can do but little, it is a comfort to help some of these poor creatures, especially the children and old people."
"It is," he returned. "And if it be consolatory to minister to their physical wants, how much more to feed their immortal souls!"
Katherine was silent for a few minutes, and then said: "It is impossible they can think much about their souls when they suffer so keenly in their bodies. Poverty and privation which destroy self-respect cannot allow of spiritual aspiration. Is it to be always like this--one class steeped in luxury, the other grovelling in cruel want?"
"Our Lord says, 'Ye have the poor always with you,'" returned Bertie. "Nor can we hope to see the curse of original sin lifted from life here below until the great manifestation; in short, till Shiloh come."