When they had finished the hymn, the Mar^chale thanked her audience, adding that they could hear her again at Rne Auber Hall ; and that she knew a Eriend, of whom she wished to tell them. As she and her comrades turned to walk out, the man in the white apron bowed, as if they had done him a service.
" May I come another time ? " said the Mar^chale.
" Certainly, Mademoiselle ! " ^
1. What is the source of courage ? It is waiting on the Lord. That is the truest and deepest source of courage. To believe that He is, and that He has made us for Himself ; to love Him, and give ourselves up to Him, because He is holy and true and wise and good and brave beyond all human thought ; to lean upon Him and trust Him and rest in Him, with confidence that He will never leave us nor forsake us : to work for Him, and suffer for His sake, and be faithful to His service — that is the way to learn courage. Without God what can we do ? We are frail, weak, tempted, mortal. The burdens of life will crush us, the evils of sin will destroy us, the tempests of trouble will overwhelm us, the darkness of death will engulf us. But if we are joined to God, we can resist and endure and fight and conquer in His strength. This is what the Psalmist means in the text, " Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart."
» J. Strahan, The Mardchale (1913), 114.
32 WAITING COURAGEOUSLY
Had we the strength ! — Have we perhaps the strength,
Who have all else beside ? Are we not men ?
Is not the Universe our dwelling-place ?
And therefore perfectly in truth for us
Is not the utmost wholly possible ? . . .
O, with the baffled and the resolute
Vanguard of liberal humanity, —
O to so purge our lives of the mild hours,
Our hearts of humble longings and meek hopes,
Our minds of customs and credulities.
That we may find the days wholly fulfilled
And lightened of the Spirit — all the days
And all things and ourselves, rich and revealed
In the majestic meanings and the might
And passion and pure purpose of the soul ! ^
^ Torstensohn was one of the generals formed in the school of Gustavus Adolphus. To him that great commander transmitted the prosecution of the Thirty Years' War. Physically, he was so shattered and dislocated by disease and deformity that he could neither walk nor ride on horseback. He had to be carried at the head of his forces in a litter. Yet no commander of his age was so resistless and terrible in his onset and so invariably victorious. Let us be loath to accept infirmity as an excuse for uselessness. A naturalist asks : " How is it that the golden- crested wren, apparently so weak and helpless, can fly right across the North Sea from Norway ? " Because God knows how to fix strange energy within delicate organisms. Our very infirmities through resolution and grace may give us special efficacy.^
2. How does waiting on God sustain our courage ?
(1) Our heart is strengthened by waiting upon God, because we receive a mysterious strength through the incoming of the Eternal Spirit into our souls. No man can explain this, but many of us know what it is. How wonderfully do the secret springs of omnipotence break into the feeble soul and fill it with might in the inner man. Through the sacred anointing of the Holy Ghost we have been made to shout for joy. He that made us has put His hand a second time to the work, and restored to us the joy of His salvation, filled our emptiness, removed our weak- ness, and triumphed in us gloriously.
^ G. C. Lodge, Poems and Dramas, ii. 137. • W. L. Watkinson.
PSALM XXVII. 14 33
^ That these days at the Keswick Convention in 1889 were a turning-point in Mr. Maegregor's life, there is not the smallest doubt. That they made his later ministry what it was, is equally certain. To say that he sometimes appeared to claim for this experience and its effects more tlian the facts altogether warranted, is only to say that, though remarkably enlightened and strengthened by God's Spirit, he remained a fallible human being. But no one who knew George Macgregor, either as a man or a minister, before that crisis and after it, could question that he found then a new secret of strength both for his own life and for his work.^
(2) Waiting upon God makes men grow small, and dwarfs the world and all its affairs, till we see their real littleness. Set your great troubles before the infinite God, and they will dwarf into such little things that you will never notice them again, " He taketh up the isles as a very little thing," and " the nations are as a drop of a bucket " ; and this great God teaches us to look at earthly things in the same light as He does, till, though the whole world should be against us, we can smile at its rage. Our worst ills are utterly despised when we learn to measure them by the line of the Eternal.