2. It is only by waiting on the Lord that His ways can be discovered and understood. Our hasty glances an3~~hurried' inferences are sure to err. You notice Israel in this chapter — captive, broken-hearted, and complaining — says, " My way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God." How often have we fallen into such pettish and childish thoughts of our heavenly Father ! We forget how great, how calm, how unwearied and unwearying He is ! " The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not. There is no searching of his understanding " ; but waiting upon Him brings us to know Him, and so renews our strength.
II Several years ago a connection was discovered by a man of science between two sets of natural facts which seem far enough apart, viz. the magnetic currents of the earth and the spots on the sun. It was made in this way : A German astronomer, Schwabe, of Dessau, capital of the Duchy of Anhalt, for a very long succes- sion of years observed and kept account of the number of sun-
* J. Laidlaw, Studies in the PardbUt, p. 262,
244 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
spots seen every day, so that a periodic rise and fall in the numbers was made out, during regular cycles of eleven years, corresponding with a like cycle of magnetic storms on the earth. Now this law or fact was learned by waiting for it. So many years the observer spent to satisfy himself, and so many more years to convince the world. For forty-two years the sun never rose a single morning, clear of clouds, above the flat horizon of that German plain at Dessau, but the patient telescope of Schwabe confronted him. On an average, about 300 days out of every year the observations were taken, so that over 12,000 times was the sun seen, and above 5000 groups of sun-spots were discovered. "An instance," were the words used in awarding a prize to Schwabe, "of devoted persistence unsiirpassed in the annals of astronomy." The energy of one man has discovered what had eluded even the suspicion of astronomers for two hundred years. The scientific observer has faith in the uniformity and consistency of nature. He waits for it. He " believes " that it is, and that it becomes a rewarder of those who diligently seek it.^
3. There is even a simpler and more direct explanation of the fact that " waiting upon the Lord renews our strength." The ancient Greeks had a fable of an earth-born giant who could not be overcome by the ordinary process of knocking him down, for the reason that every time he touched his mother -earth he revived. Now invert that process. It describes the secret of the strength of faith. It is heaven-born. All grace is of the Lord. Each act of fresh dependence upon God "renews its strength." Everything that breaks us off from self and means, and drives us up in our helplessness to the Lord, is our gain. For " He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might he increaseth strength " (v. 29). " Most gladly therefore," as St. Paul says, " will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me ; for when I am weak, then am I strong" (2 Cor. xii. 9, 10).
H You touch your electric button, and immediately the bell in your kitchen rings. You know that an influence of some kind, which is generated in the cells lying down in your cellar, is carried in a trice round the wires and makes that bell ring; but what that influence is, or how it passes along the wires, neithet you nor the wisest electrician in the world can tell. Yet you believe that such influence or power exists, and you act upon your belief. So I am told that waiting upon God produces renewed strength.
^ G. H. Morgan.
ISAIAH 245
Although I do not know how that strength travels from God to me, though I am unable to define that strength, yet when, after testing the statement, I find it to be correct in practice, I will believe it, and act upon that belief.^
U " With five shillings," said Teresa the mystic, when her friends laughed at her proposal to build an orphanage — " with five shillings Teresa can do nothing ; but with five shillings and God there is nothing Teresa cannot do." ^
Lord, at Thy feet my prostrate heart is lying,
Worn with the burden, weary of the way ; The world's proud sunshine on the hills is dying,
And morning's promise fades with parting day ; Yet in Thy light another morn is breaking.
Of fairer promise, and with pledge more true, And in Thy life a dawn of youth is waking
Whose bounding pulses shall this heart renew.
Oh, to go back across the years long vanished,
To have the words unsaid, the deeds undone. The errors cancelled, the deep shadows banished,
In the glad sense of a new world begun ; To be a little child, whose page of story
Is yet undimmed, unblotted by a stain. And in the sunrise of primeval glory
To know that life has had its start again !