^ In the most impressionable years of my life I came under the influence of a teacher who was philosopher, historian, and poet — the late Thomas Goadby, Principal of the Midland Baptist College. Nature he loved with a deep and tender and passionate love, and Nature never did betray the heart that loved her. She filled his life with blessings, but her best gift was the love he bore her. Wordsworth was his Master ; but the great classical passages of Nature-adoration from Byron and Matthew Arnold were also day by day upon his lips. The " Presence . . . whose dwelling is the light of setting suns," the " Heaven " which " lies about us in our infancy," " the light which never was on sea or land," with all those magical lines from " Immortality," " Tintern Abbey," " The Excursion," " Childe Harold," and " Obermann," which, once heard, make melody in our hearts for ever, grew more real, more full of meaning and power, when they were half-spoken, half-chanted by his deep organ-voice. And one summer Sunday night, when our work was done, and we were walking home, after quoting, as he used to, not caring whether any one listened or not, some of these glorious lines, he said to me, " I am all my life trying to get at the Eeality which lies behind the illusion of God's richer, nearer presence, the illusion which made Wordsworth what he was, and which turns all our thoughts, yours and mine, to poetry to- night." 2
4. In Fellowship with Christ.
This is the last and best way of finding rest in retirement. This covers all other ways with worth. This brings them ^ ▲. Whyte. " 0. h\ Aksd.
ST. MARK i8i
together and binds them into one full blessing. Our Lord did not send the disciples into retirement ; He went with them. He did not say " Go ye apart." He said " Come ye apart."
^ A person who had long practised many austerities, without finding any comfort or change of heart, was once complaining of his state to a certain bishop. " Alas ! " said he, " self-will and self-righteousness follow me everywhere. Only tell me where you think I shall learn to leave myself. Will it be by study, or prayer, or good works ? " "I think," replied the bishop, " that the place where you lose self will be that where you find your Saviour." ^
All in the April evening April airs were abroad;
The sheep with their little lambs Passed by me on the road.
The sheep with their little lambs
Passed by me on the road: All in an April evening
I thought on the Lamb of God.*
V.
The Gains of Eetieement.
1 Knowledge of the Work we are Doing. — By going apart for rest we shall gain a bird's-eye view of the field of life and duty. In the midst of life's moving affairs we see life fragmentarily and not entire. We note a text, but not a context. We see items, but we are blind to their relationships. We see facts, but we do not mark their far-reaching issue and destiny. We are often ill-informed as to the true size of a thing which looms large in the immediate moment. Things seen within narrow walls assume an appalling bulk. A lion in your back yard is one thing ; with a continent to move in, it is quite another. There are many feverish and threatening crises which would dwindle into harmless proportions if only we saw them in calm detachment. There are some things which we can never see with true interpretation until we get away from them. There is nothing more hideous and confusing
^ Eran H. Hopkins. * Katharine Tynan Hinkson.
i82 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
than an oil painting when viewed at the distance of an inch. To see it we must get away from it.
2. Knowledge of Ourselves. — Well might the heathen poet say, " The maxim, ' Know thyself,' came down from heaven." In the light of Christianity we may say self-knowledge is the whole of religion. To know one's self is for the Christian to realise the two inseparable truths of human weakness and God's strength. It culminates in the experience of one who has learned to say : " When I am weak, then am I strong " ; "I live ; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." And for this self- knowledge seasons of retirement are an indispensable qualifica- tion. For in the world we live more or less a life that is not our true life. There is, at the present time, an element of competition even in spiritual things ; men are, as it were, kept up to the mark by their proximity to others, by a desire not to be left behind in goodness or morality; and often we do not realise how artificial our standards are, how much our life was resting upon the opinion of others. The love of approbation which, though in itself a good, often becomes a false, motive in our lives.
3. Knowledge of God. — This is the true and the only real counterpart of the knowledge of self. It is the realising of God's strength made perfect in man's weakness which alone can save us from despair. Eetirement is the great means of knowing God. For knowledge is born of intercourse and communion with its objects. He who would know his fellow- men must live among them. He who would draw closer the ties which bind him to his brother man, whether it be for business and commerce or for pleasure and society, loses no opportunity for being near to and mixing with his fellows. He who made man his study sought to learn His subject in the crowded market-place. And if we are to know God it must be by losing no opportunity for being with Him ; with Him in those places where He has set His Name — in His Church, and His Sacrament, and His Word ; above all, in prayer.