^ One of our bishops, when he was a London incumbent, was at one time deeply distressed by the persistent calumnies of a certain obnoxious parishioner. He wrote for advice to a high legal luminary, who was also a very religious man. His answer was laconic ; it was a quotation : " * Jesus stood before the governor. . . . And when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, he answered nothing, . . . insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly.' Dear So-and-so, let the governor marvel greatly." ^
There is a kind of negative tribulation which also comes from without. It is the disappointment that others cause us — the things we have to do without. Some glowing purpose has been suddenly frustrated; some bit of found work has been rudely broken. We suffer profound disappointment. And disappoint- ment is apt to kindle irritation, and when that fire begins to burn much valuable furniture is in danger of being consumed.
^ One of the greatest crises in Principal Eainy's life was when the House of Lords delivered judgment against the United Free Church. Kainy had given the strength of his life to promoting the union between his own Church and the United Presbyterian Church, and now it seemed as though he had only brought his own Church into grave trouble. He was in the House of Lords when judgment was given. After the decision he took Mr. Haldane's arm and passed out with him. He was his guest in London. Mr. Haldane says that on the way home he never spoke. When they reached home he sat down and without any bitterness or resentment spoke, and " the one expression of regret that fell from his lips was that he was old."
Loitering progress is tribulation of an allied kind. Things are walking, and we want them to run ; or they are running, and we want them to fly. We hear one and another say : " Things don't go fast enough for me " ; or " Things are too slow for me." And
* Basil Wilberforce.
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we become irritated, and then irritable, and we lose our patience, and in losing our patience we lose the very spirit and instrument of progress. How true this is in our relationship to little children, and especially to little children who are not highly gifted, and who have the misfortune to be dull-witted and slow. How fatal is the mistake to become impatient with them. To become impatient is to deprive them of the very atmosphere they require for journeying at all ; impatience never converts duU-wittedness into quick- wittedness, and the teacher or parent who becomes impatient is robbing the child of its heritage, increasing its load of disadvantage, and making its little pilgrim journey prematurely dark and hard.
0 comrade bold, of toil and pain !
Thy trial how severe, When sever'd first by prisoner's chain
From thy loved labour-sphere !
Say, did impatience first impel
The heaven-sent bond to break? Or, couldst thou bear its hindrance well,
Loitering for Jesu's sake ?
0 might we know ! for sore we feel
The languor of delay, When sickness lets our fainter zeal.
Or foes block up our way.
Lord ! who Thy thousand years dost wait
To work the thousandth part Of Thy vast plan, for us create
With zeal a patient heart.^
2. Tribulation from within. — Quite as much of our tribulation is internal ; it is not occasioned by others. Such trouble may be physical, as St. Paul's own " thorn in the flesh." Or it may be mental and spiritual. There is no one who does any thinking at all but has entered the dark, cold, chilling circle of apparently insoluble mystery. It may be the burdensome presence of immediate and palpable realities, such as the presence of suffering and pain. Or it may be those problems lying upon the borderland, or well within that mysterious realm where we seem to have
^ J. H. Newman.
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neither eyes nor ears, hands nor feet: the mystery ot God, the mystery of Providence, the mystery of Jesus Christ — His incarnation, His resurrection. His glorification, His relation to sin and hope and human endeavour and the veiled to-morrow; and all the great pressing problems of human birth, and human life, and human destiny. What shall we do with them ? Or, what shall we not do with them ? Let us make it an essential in all our assumptions that a prerequisite to all discovery is patience in tribulation. Do not let us deal with them as though they were Christmas puzzles, to be taken up at odd moments and cursorily examined, and then thrown aside again in irritation and impetuous haste.
^ Dr. Jowett says, " I am amazed to observe how hastily men and women drop these things; they 'cannot be bothered with them,' and so they retreat into a perilous indifference or into a fruitless agnosticism. George Eliot dropped her vital faith in the course of eleven days. Eobert Elsmere dropped his vital faith with almost equal celerity. I heard from one young fellow who was burning all his boats and refusing to sail these vast, mysterious, glorious seas, and all because he had read a little pamphlet of not more than fifty pages from cover to cover ! "