^ If our faith is to be true, we need the simple, direct sense
^ E, B, Browning, A Sea-side Meditaiion.
58 ROOM TO LIVE
of God the Father that we had as children — we need that ex- panded into a sense of the great, living God. What was dear to us in our childhood's religion is purified and preserved and strengthened by the wider range which the expansion of our life has opened up. In one of Shakespeare's sonnets he writes :
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight: But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.
Now what Shakespeare wrote about this friendship, we may apply to the time in which we are living. It is the thought of God which lifts us up above the melancholy of the past, and delivers us from the weakness that morbid regret instilled into our hearts. We believe in a God of our life who is able to develop our growth. We learn from Jesus to recognize in God's handling of us that any outward change, however unwelcome, must be accompanied by an inward access of moral strength. Whatever God takes from us in that way comes back to us in another form, enriched, enlarged.^
"^ 2. The thought of God will reveal a purpose in trouble. We shall realize that " in every sorrow of the heart, Eternal INIercy bears a part." God's good purpose runs through our saddened hours. It is then that pride dies and sympathy is born. But if we forget God we reverse this order of things. We grow narrower and colder and harder. We drift into cynicism and pessimism. We are the worse instead of the better for our tears. There is an old saying attributed to Christ that has a double significance. It runs : " He that is near Me is near the fire." To be near the fire is to be tested, perhaps scorched and made hard. But it is also to be warmed and cheered, and the double action is felt by each disciple. Attempts at serious, earnest living will always involve pain, but it will be pain that is compensated by stronger and sweeter strength. Life is neither all sunshine nor all gloom. A restless devil and a changing world will account for discomforts, and there are moments of intense dreariness, gloom, bitterness, and woe. Then I am with you, says the Lord, as a Comforter able to help, to bring Lazarus from the dead ; and this
» J. Moffatt
PSALM XXXI. 8 59
is more than we dare ask for or can realize. As the chaplain said to the dying Highlander — "Geordie, 'tis just Jesus"; and where the cloud appears Jesus is not far away.
^ Mr. A. C. Benson has described in The House of Quiet the '/ life of a man who had attained, after a youth of unstable health, to an apparently sound constitution, and was now living out a full and happy and useful life in London. Suddenly his old delicacy of health reappeared. He consulted an eminent physician. He came out of the consulting-room with a virtual sentence of death. "To say farewell to the bustle and activity of life; to be laid aside on a shelf like a cracked vase, turning as far as possible my ornamental front to the world ; to live the shadowed life, a creature of rules and hours — a degrading and humiliating role." But he accepted the will of God. He took up his cross. He passed into " The House of Quiet," expecting only the peace of a difficult resignation. But in " The House of Quiet " a new life began. An unexpected feeling of the possibilities of life dawned. His perceptions became more delicate. The gush of morning air, the liquid song of birds, the sprouting of the green buds, the babble of the stream gave a new delight. His intellectual life grew strong, eager, discerning. A quickened taste for pure and noble reading, and a fresh joy in beauty, filled him with rapture. Then there swelled within him a more deliberate intention of enjoying simple things and of expecting beauty in homely life. At last he awoke to his true service. He had hitherto looked on at life around him with a dimmed eye and dulled ear. Now all the cries of the sick and the pained, and all the eager and appealing voices of the young and wistful, and all the soft, low sobbing of the bereaved fell upon his ears. All the needs, daily and clamant, of his neighbours rose up in appeal. This broken man, walking on the edge of death's abyss, gave up his life and used his feeble strength to help and to comfort others. He found that he had entered a new world. He no longer lived in the isolation of the strong, the successful, the selfish. New felicities swelled within his iieart. New and unhoped-for strength was given. His life became a life of faith and love ; and that rest which is our deepest satisfaction is always their first- born child.^
The cry of man's anguish went up unto God: