214 VISIONS AND OBEDIENCE
poured upon the persecutor as he reeled from his horse on the way to the great city.
3. Besides "outward and ordinary means," there are also golden moments of inspiration and encouragement; and such moments we all can and ought to watch for. Dull indeed, or very depraved, is the life that never knows them. Even the most apparently commonplace career is often lightened by them, unknown to men ; and many are the channels through which God sends them into the twilight in which we move. Sometimes they come through the conversation of a friend, sometimes through the appeal of a noble life; now it is the voice of conscience that brings them, now it is the pathos or terror of some passing event ; or, again, we receive them from a poet's art, or from a wandering melody, or even from a purple blossom of the woods. There is no mysticism, no idle dreaming here: men have been strangely guided by such things ere now; they are strangely guided by them to-day. Doubtless we are the creatures of a mood: but then it is the higher moods that we have to seek, and these are some of the ways in which we find them.
TJ A short time ago, at a Convention in which I had to take some part, a working man rose to give a testimony. He told us that he was the son of a Dorset labourer, that twenty years ago he came to Lancashire to work in the mill, that he was converted in the church where we met, and that ever since he had been a worker in the church. But last year he was stricken with an illness, and his spiritual joy left him. The depression was almost unbearable. One morning he started out for the moors. It was a beautiful May day, and the air was filled with the singing of the birds, and the heather was lit up with sunshine. The impulse to pray came upon him, and for an hour — to use his own words — " for an hour upon my knees I held a conversation. Suddenly I was wonderfully conscious of the Divine Presence. Christ spoke to me. He showed me the print of the nails and the wounded side, and my heart exclaimed, ' My Lord and my God.' " Then said he, " Account for it as you may, but there streamed in upon me a heavenly joy which I had never known before, and which has never left me. It fills me with song. It transfigures my work. It gives me power." Such was his testimony.1
4. Of course we must not look for heavenly visions of a miraculous kind. Our unimportance in the history of the world
1 W. Redfern.
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would not warrant us in indulging in any such vain anticipations. But in due measure and in proportion to that which we are, those very dreams of youth which inspire us to think and then to plan and to work, are God's way of arousing us to fill worthily that place in life towards which He is calling us ; and we should in that sense accept and obey " the heavenly vision " that is granted to us. Such day-dreams are often enough disfigured and degraded by elements of mere selfish and earthly ambition ; but it is the province of religion to purge our ideals, while the ideal itself would perhaps be too little attractive if at the first it revealed itself to us in that austere form which on closer acquaintance we find that it really possesses.
Tf Nobody is without ideals of heroism, of self-devotion, or disinterestedness. They are very common in books ; they are not uncommon in life. Everybody knows some men and women whose hearts are touched with a profound pity for the infinite sorrows of humanity, whose lives are more or less governed by that pity ; who count it a better thing (when opportunity offers) to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction than to spend a merry evening among their own. Everybody sees what a beneficent thing a woman's life may be when it is wholly given up to the service of humanity and of God. You may be as keenly alive to the errors and mischiefs of Eomanism as any one ; but when you take note of one of those little Sisters of the Poor and the kind of life they lead, you perceive at once that they have seen a very heavenly Vision and are entirely obedient to it. Their active devotion to the needs of others belongs not in any sense to Romanism ; it belongs to Christianity pure and simple. If one should compare their life with the life of an ordinary woman of fashion in this city, one sees that it possesses unspeak- ably more of nobility, more of happiness, more of reward, even in this world. No one can miss that.1
I fear not Thy withdrawal; more I fear, Seeing, to know Thee not — hoodwinked with dreams Of signs and wonders — while, unnoticed, Thou, Walking Thy garden still, commun'st with men, Missed in the commonplace of Miracle ! 2
5. But it is not by the gift of ideals only that God's hand is found in our lives. It is by their constant surrender and the acceptance of higher ideals in their place. There was a vision