^ Did you ever know a man converted by the Ten Command- ments, or by the Athanasian Creed ? Is it not rather some word of ineffable love, some manifestation of "him whom we have pierced," some yearning of great sorrow, that, filling our heart, has subdued it to penitence or constrained it to prayer ? Some calamity has befallen, some sickness nigh unto death, some bereavement of wife, or child, when God has comforted us, or pointed us to " the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." ^
' H. Allon, The Indwelling Christ, 243.
312 GOD'S GENTLENESS
^ If for every rebuke that we utter of men's vices, we put forth a claim upon their hearts ; if for every assertion of God's demands from them, we could substitute a display of His kindness to them ; if side by side with every warning of death, we could exhibit proofs and promises of immortality ; if, in fine, instead of assuming the being of an awful Deity, which men, though they cannot and dare not deny, are always unwilling, sometimes unable to conceive, we were to show them a near, visible, inevitable, but all beneficent Deity, whose presence makes the earth itself a heaven, I think there would be fewer deaf children sitting in the market-place.^
3. God carries on His educative processes by gentle methods. Of course it were an easy thing for God to shield us from all danger, so that we should know nothing of toil and suffering. He might flood our minds from day to day with the light of truth, so that doubt and ignorance should never darken them. He might give us strength so much beyond our needs that we should never feel the assaults of temptation, and so we should never sin. He might so appal us by the terrors of the law that we should be compelled to do His will without any vision of its beauty or ap- proval of its goodness. But all this, pleasant though it might seem to little children, were to do violence to religion, conscience, and will, to dishonour our true manhood and to render for ever im- possible our growth in the knowledge, love, and true obedience of His blessed law. No. God has begotten us : we are His children. In fatherly wisdom, in motherly gentleness. He bends to our weakness that He may educate and perfect us. By daily need, and the thirst which springs from need, the mind of man is quickened into activity and led to seek for truth that it may grow thereby. The moral nature even from childhood has free play : good and evil are ever presenting themselves in infinitely varied forms ; he is called to make a real choice between right and wrong, to set his affections upon the things that are good and fair, and with a regal will to follow in the paths of virtue. God will have us grow in the only possible way — by our own free effort. He will have us pass, with His help, through an endless series of new births, in all of which He so hides Himself that we are unconscious of His quickening power, from strength to strength, from grace to grace, till at last we appear in glory.
^ Ruskin.
PSALM XVIII. 35 313
^ There is a gentleman still living in Birmingham, who was once Mayor, of whom a pleasant little story is told. One day, when he was Mayor of the town, he had to pass up the Bull Eing, as the open space near the great Market Hall is called. A little donkey, with a big load behind it, was struggling its hardest to drag the load up the hill. A big brute on two legs was beating the poor beast that walked on four. The Mayor, the chief magistrate of the place, saw what he was doing. He might have called a policeman to lock up the fellow who used the stick on the patient, dumb creature. But instead, he went up to him and said: "Hold on, man, be merciful as well as powerful, and come behind and put your shoulder to the cart." The Mayor put his shoulder against the cart, and soon the difficulty was passed. Gentleness as well as greatness were surely there.^
^ I have recalled gratefully again and again a word that my drawing-master gave me when I was a little lad, blundering at my first lesson. I had set the copy before me and was trying very hard to reproduce it — but, alas ! what crooked lines. How impossible it was for anything to be like my picture ; — and yet how impossible it seemed to make my picture what it should be. Smudged and messed by many rubbings out and many failures, trying only made the matter worse. Then came the master and took the pencil, and in the twinkling of an eye the thing was done, every stroke firm, straight, exact. Then my despair was completed — I had tried so hard and failed so utterly, and he had done it without trying at all ! I laid down the pencil with a sigh, and said, " I shall never draw."
" Nonsense," said the master cheerily, patting me on the shoulder. " You can draw as well as I could when I was your age ! "