yields ; Let Nature take thee to her heart ! she hath a bounteous breast That yearns o'er all her sorrowing sons, and she will give thee
rest."
But Nature on the spirit-sick as on the spirit-free Smiled, like a fair unloving face too bright for sympathy; Sweet, ever sweet, are whispering leaves, are waters in their
flow, But never on them breathed a tone to comfort human woe!
Small solace for the deer that hath the arrow in its side, — And only seeks the woods to die, — that o'er his dappled hide Spread purple blooms of bedded heath, and ferny branchings
tall— A deadly hurt must have strong cure, or it hath none at all;
I KINGS XIX. II, 12 437
And the old warfare from within that had gone on so long, The wasting of the inner strife, the sting of outward wrong, Went with me o'er the breezy hill, went with me up the glade — I found not God among the trees, and yet I was afraid !
I mused, and fire that smouldered long within my breast brake
free, I said, " 0 God, Thy works are good, and yet they are not
Thee; Still greater to the sense is that which breathes through every
part, Still sweeter to the heart than all is He who made the heart!
i will seek Thee, not Thine, 0 Lord! for (now I mind me)
still Thou sendest us for soothing not to fountain, nor to hill; Yet is there comfort in the fields if we walk in them with
Thee, Who saidest, ' Come, ye burdened ones, ye weary, unto Me.' " ^
3. God ignored the old means of manifestation because of the present needs of His prophet. Elijah had read into the Divine character the swift impatience of his own angry heart. He was not one of those who find it easy to live quietly. Born a Gileadite, he retained to the end much of the restlessness of the Bedouin, Headlong, impetuous, and swift to strike where it ieemed that a blow was the shortest way to attain his purpose, lie could confront a whole college of idolatrous priests and enjoy the combat. There is a kind of stern joy in the truculent irony of his taunts on Carmel which shows how much to his liking was the contest in which he was engaged. As the storm raged over Horeb his fierce nature would recognize a brother in the wild wind ; the shocks of earthquake found an echo in the depths of his tumultuous spirit; the flashing lightning reflected the swift movements of his own fiery passions. He would be quick to see the hand of God in a national catastrophe ; but not until it had been specially shown to him could he find the evidence of higher working when things had settled down into common channels. He would always choose the short cut to success, and he thought God must do so too. lAke the Baptist in the dungeon of Machaerus, when the immediate developments that he expected
* Dora Greenwell.
438 A STILL SMALL VOICE
did not follow, he found himself in anguish of soul, doubting whether he was not altogether mistaken, and for the time being he was crushed under a burden which he could not sustain. Men of this type make splendid reformers, and they are the born pioneers of any new movement for God and righteousness. But they are generally too summary in their verdicts to be good judges of the Divine dealings with men as a whole. Sooner or later they fall into the mistake that things are not moving fast enough.
^ Savonarola, whose burning utterances from the pulpit of the Duomo flashed like the sword of God of which he spoke into the guilty heart of fifteenth-century Florence, went far beyond the guidance of the Spirit within him, when he assumed to know that only through a storm of vengeance would the Church be purged of its abuses, and the clergy be restored from licentiousness and formalism to the spirituality which he felt was their supreme need. The needed renewal came to Europe ; but it came rather through the spiritual awakening of the Eeformation than through any vast temporal judgments upon the Papacy, and the brave monk died in no small measure a martyr to his own mistakes. The tempestuous spirit of Luther needed to be balanced by the saner and more sympathetic insight of Melanchthon. In the work of the Apostles the strenuous energy of St. Peter had to be tempered by the spirituality of St. John.^
ii. God does not reveal Himself in Nature finally.
The second point we would make is that God does not mani- fest Himself to us finally or in His fulness in Nature, or in the forces which in our text are mirrored by Nature.
The world cannot be exhausted by physical explanations : and so the savage who worships the forces of nature, and the scientist who declares them to be the ultimate source of all things, are equally and very similarly in the wrong. God is not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. These are only the fringe of His garment, the shadow of His inner glory. God is a Spirit, and is known through the vocal silence of spiritual fellowship.