" Now what dost Thou fashion ? " Thy hand would not stay
Untiring, resistless, without any sound,
True, true to its Master, the wheel would go round.
How plastic are we as we live in Thy hands ! Who, who as the Potter the Clay understands? Thy ways are a wonder, but oft, as a spark, Some hint of Thy meaning shines out in the dark.
What portion is this for the sensitive Clay ! To be beaten and moulded from day unto day; To answer not, question not, just to be still, And know Thou art shaping us unto Thy will.
This, this may we plead with Thee, Workman Divine — Press deep in our substance some symbol of Thine, Thy name or Thy image, and let it be shown That Thou wilt acknowledge the work as Thine own.
II.
The Marring.
1. The raw material with which the potter works is clay. This is the stuff of which each vessel, no matter what its shape may be, is composed. There resides in it the promise of becoming an object of usefulness or of beauty, once it has been subjected to the process of manufacture. Our lives possess a similar capacity. There are possibilities in us that admit of being realized. Out of the undeveloped material, which the fact of our existence in time represents, there can be produced forms and modes of personality of the most diverse kinds. Like the clay, we yield to treatment. Our natures are plastic. Powers of body and mind and will, abilities of a physical, an intellectual, and a moral order, manifest themselves. Character expresses itself, and more and more tends to stereotype itself on settled lines, and to harden into a per- manent shape. Whereas in the early period there was little by which to distinguish one life from another ; in the later, peculi- arities assert themselves, differences are conspicuous. We display our individuality not only by the features of our face, our height,
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our speech, our manner of walking, but in a multitude of character- istic ways, definable in some cases, but in others too subtle to be explained in words.
^J I have been spending the week's end with a friend in Sussex. On Sunday morning we strolled upon the downs — ascending many miles to a stretch of pasture where, losing sight of the sea, we had nothing but the zenith above us and the wide veldt below. There we lay upon the grass, where Proserpina had evidently been before us, for it was bright with flowers ; the summer air was soft, and flooded with golden light, and there was no sound except the singing of a lark at an immeasurable height. Suddenly the line against the sky formed by the brow of the hill was broken with moving shapes, and almost before we could spring to our feet we were surrounded by a countless flock of sheep. On they came, like Dante's lost souls in the Divine Comedy. To me they seemed all alike, but the shepherd told us that he knew every one of them, as a schoolmaster knows his scholars. My friend and I exchanged thoughts. He was a landscape painter, and our conver- sation fell on the limitations of our vision. We found that a traveller — we were both travellers — in a strange country is quick to discern the difference between race and race; but slow to discern the difference between face and face in the same race. To an Englishman, visiting for the first time a plantation in the Southern States, the negroes are black — that is all. To the African in London, we are — white. To both of us all pigtails are alike. The subtler differences of form and expression, by which we discriminate character and disposition, and which we count beautiful or ugly, have to be learned like a new language.1
2. Clay and human life are alike subject to effects being pro- duced on them by a cause outside themselves. We know this about ourselves, that our lives do not consist of a series of experi- ences which we determine beforehand. We have not the choosing of our future, any more than we had of our past or of our present, in all the circumstances of it. The orbit of our career does not follow the path traced by our preconceptions and wishes. Things happen to us — bringing unexpected joys, or unlooked-for sorrows. Events take place, in whose initiation and accomplishment we had no part. We are indeed often denied even the opportunity of foreseeing them and preparing for them. They occur without any premonition. Perhaps we are apt to forget this fact about the 1 Sir Wyke Bayliss, Olives, 137.
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circumstances of our lives. Incidents of an ordinary kind, while they befall us in the character of unanticipated happenings, are not sufficiently unfamiliar to remind us of it. But when any great event takes place — any event, that is to say, which is fraught with serious consequences to us and ours, and which transforms our whole outlook ; when God asserts His power in our life either in His providence or in His grace — then we realize that, in a true sense, we are clay.
T[ The evening exercise, on the question anent the providence of God, was sweet to me ; and in converse after it, it was a pleasure to think and speak of the saints' grounds of encouragement from that head under trouble ; particularly, how 'tis their God that guides the world ; and nothing do they meet with but what comes thro' their Lord's fingers ; how He weighs their troubles to the least grain, that no more falls to their share than they need ; and how they have a covenant-right to chastisements, to the Lord's dealing with them as with sons to be rightly educated, not as servants whom the master will not strike but put away at the term.1