That night her
mother had talked of God's Fools and how they were the world's wisest
men.
"If you are not very wise, darling," her mother had said, "God has a
chance to use you better. It is so very hard for clever people to do
things for God, humbly--which is the only way--because they are egotists
wanting to show their own cleverness and not His all the time."
That night she had told Marcella the story of Parsifal, the "pure fool"
and how he, too big a fool to know his own name properly, had come to
the court of the king who was too ill to do anything, God's work or
man's.
"You see, this king had been given the sacred Spear. So long as he had
it no enemy could hurt him or his kingdom. But when he forgot, and
pleased himself just for a moment, the enemy got the Spear and wounded
him with it. No one could cure him till poor Parsifal came along--a
poor simpleton who had been brought up in the desert. And the only
reason he could win back the Spear, and cure the king, and bring back
the symbol of God's Presence on earth again, was that he was so sorry
for the king. He wanted so much to heal him that, whenever he got tired
and sick, and whenever he got into temptations he was able to conquer
them. It was his pity made him conquer where wiser people, more selfish
and less loving, had failed.
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