When He appoints to meet thee, go thou forth.
It matters not If south or north.
Bleak waste or sunny plot. Nor think, if haply He thou seek'st be late.
He does thee wrong; To stile or gate
Lean thou thy head, and long! It may be that to spy thee He is mounting
Upon a tower, Or in tliy counting
Thou hast mista'en the hour.
1 Hugh Black.
PSALM XXVII. 14 23
But, if He come not, neither do thou go
Till Vesper chime ; Belike thou then shalt know
He hath been with thee all the time.^
1. Let us wait with faith. It is faith that secures the Divine blessing — persistent, expectant faith. He cannot be said to wait upon God who disbelieves that God will come to his aid, or who doubts whether He will. Loitering about to see if anything will turn up is not the same thing, by any means, as waiting for a particular person to appear, or a particular event to happen. Faith and expectation characterize the latter condition as distinct from the former. And these qualities belong to the very nature of the exercise of " waiting on God." The more unwavering a man's faith is, in fact, and the higher he stretches on tiptoe of expecta- tion, the more accurately may he be described as a man waiting on God. " My soul," cries the Psalmist, " waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning." How eager he represents himself to be by that figure of the anxious watchers scanning the eastern skies for signs of daybreak ! And how con- fident, too ! For more surely than the sun shall climb up over the horizon and dispel the shadows of night, his God, he believes, shall cause His face to shine upon him. His God and our God — it is not to immensity or infinity, or some dimly comprehended and overwhelming attribute, precariously personified, that we look up for help and a response to our supplications. It is to the living, self-revealing God, who hath " of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets," and who " hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son."
^ There is a school of philosophy, much current in our day, which tells us that religious truth is relative to the individual ; the way to test a religion is to live it. If the philosophy of the pragmatists be right, then few forms of religious creed can claim better witness to their truth than that wherein Florence Nightin- gale lived and moved and had her being. She had " remodelled her whole religious belief from beginning to end," and had " learnt to know God" in the years immediately preceding her active work in the world. Her belief helped to sustain her natural courage amidst the horrors of Scutari, and the fever and the cold of Balaclava. It inspired the life of arduous labour to which she
* T. E. Brown, Old John and Other Poems, 244
24 WAITING COURAGEOUSLY
devoted herself on returning from the East. It informed her unceasing efforts for the health of the Army and the people, for the reformation of hospitals, for the creation of an art of nursing. Does some one doubt whether any vital force can have proceeded from a belief in Law as the Thought of God, and suggest that to herself as to others she was offering a stone instead of bread ? It was not so. To her the religion which she found was as the body and blood of the Most High.^
^ In the early spring of 1881 Captain Catherine Booth and her intrepid lieutenants, Florence Soper, Adelaide Cox, and Kuth Patrick, began life in Paris. With her own hand Catherine raised the flag at Rue d'Angouleme 66, in Belleville. Here was a hall for six hundred, situated in a court approached by a narrow street. The bulk of the audience that gathered there night after night were of the artisan class. Some were young men of a lower type, and from these came what disturbance there was. The French sense of humour is keen, and there were many lively sallies at the expense of the speakers and .singers on the platform. Meetings were held night after night, and for six months the Capitaine was never absent except on Saturdays. Those were days of fight, and she fought, to use her own phrase, like a tiger. She had to fight first her own heart. She knew her capacity, and God had done great things through her in England. The change from an audience of five thousand spell- bound hearers in the circus of Leeds to a handful of gibing ouvriers in the Belleville quarter of Paris was indeed a clashing antithesis. A fortnight passed without a single penitent, and Catherine was all the time so ill that it was doubtful if she would be able to remain in the field. That fortnight was probably the supreme trial of her faith. The work appeared so hopeless ! There was nothing to see. But for the Capitaine faith meant going on. It meant saying to her heart, "You may suffer, you may bleed, you may break, but you shall go on." She went on, believing, praying, lighting, and at last the tide of battle turned.^