PSALM cvi. 15 347
sympathy, without self-respect, without generosity, letting others minister to us without giving aught in return ? If so, it may be well to look on to the end. A day and hour will come when desire will be manifested ; when the true, deep-seated desire of each soul will be seen. Now there are restraints that hinder its manifesta- tion ; there are all sorts of considerations and motives which are keeping us back and causing us to hide our real desires. Then every man's true aim and object, as well as every man's work, will be manifested ; each one, freed from constraint, will turn to his own way. The lips of the Judge need not open to pronounce any sentence. He but lifts off each constraining law, each limiting infirmity, each instrument of education, and the result speaks for itself. Each soul, by its own inner tendency, seeks its own place. Father and son, brother and brother, sister and sister, wife and husband, each with the old habitual restraints lifted off them, turn to their own place — the one goes by an inner power to the right, the other to the left. It needs no angel to guide or urge them on. Each one turns to his own desire, to fulness or leanness, to heaven or hell.
" He will fulfil the desire of them that fear him." " Delight thyself also in the Lord ; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart." " 0 rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him ; and he will give thee thine heart's desire." It is true we have to wait ; it is true that we have to find our way to rest often through many very hvimbling disappointments ; but because the mouth of the Lord hath spoken, we may be sure that the denial of our prayers is one of the Divine blessings which fall to our lot, and that when we perish in the outward man the inward man is blessed with the renewal which will be consummated in the imperishable and unmingled bliss of heaven. Let us dare to desire, to wish, to ask for as our chief good, to be like Christ ; to have reproduced within us that loveliness of character, that tenderness of sympathy, that strength of endurance, that calm- ness under suffering, that patient self-possession which character- ized Him. We cannot see in His life anything but beauty. Let us dare to wish, to long, to pray, to struggle to be like Him, and He will give us our desire, and send fulness undreamt of — the fulness of love, and faith, and strength, and patience — into our inmost soul.
348 LEANNESS OF SOUL
^ Goodness and happiness are not one yet ; and their conflict oscillates through the centuries from asceticism on the one side to riot on the other, and from Puritanism to Stuart licence. This ever-recurring oscillation indicates a beautiful truth laid bare by our Lord. James Hinton devoted almost all his books to this conflict of goodness and happiness, and pointed out that our Lord had solved their conflict. The human heart desires happiness, and, at the same time, righteousness. A most wholesome thing it is to desire happiness. A heart that does not desire happiness is one with which I should be very sorry to have much to do. Happi- ness is a legitimate and a God-implanted desire, of which men and women need never be ashamed provided they link it to goodness. But the linking of it to goodness is only to be done by using self for others' good. That is what Hinton points out as the sum of our Lord's teaching for this life, and the conditions which are to be perfect conditions here we may assume to be entrance conditions of the life which is to come.^
The awakening swan grows tired at laSt Of weltering pastures where he feeds;
With wings and feet behind him cast, He cleaves the labyrinth of the reeds.
He arches out his sparkling plumes,
He wades and plunges, till he finds Beneath his breast the azure glooms
Where the great river brims and winds.
Then, with white sails set to the breeze,
The current cold about his feet, He fares to those Hesperides
Where morning and his comrades meet.
Nor — since within his kindling veins
A livelier ichor stirs at last — Regrets the gross and juicy stains,
The saps and savours of the past;
But through the august and solemn void
Of misty waters holds his way, By some ecstatic thirst decoyed
Towards raptures of the radiant day.
1 The Life of William Denny, 319.
PSALM cvi. 15 349
So sails the soul, and cannot rest,
Inglorious, in the marsh of peace, But leaves the good, to seek the best.
Though all its calms and comforts cease, —
Though what it seems to hold be lost,
Though that grow far which once was nigh, —
By torturing hope in anguish tossed. The awakened soul must sail or die.*
1 Edmund Gobse, In Eusset and iSilver,
A Volunteer Army.
Literature.
Ball (C. J.), Testimonies to Christ, 209.
Critchley (G.), WTien the Angels have gone Away, 163.
Duff (R. S.), Pleasant Places, 120.
Henderson (A.), Sermons, 9.
Macgregor (W. M.), Jesus Christ the Son of God, 52.