io6 AN ETERNAL WEIGHT OF GLORY
" the things not seen " as " eternal," and, at that high standpoint of illuminated reason, looks resolutely away from the former to the latter.
^ It is no mere poetical hyperbole which finds expression in such words as these :
We live in thoughts, not breaths ; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart-throbs.
Or again,
Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence.
Who is there, indeed, whose familiar experience has not taught him, in some ways at least, the power of thought to master time, of feeling to lend wings to the leaden hours, or, what is relatively to us the same, to render us unconscious of their flight ? Absorb- ing employment, intense excitements, critical emergencies, things and events that deeply affect or move us, often, as we all know, make hours to vanish unnoted and unmeasured, whole days to contract almost into the brevity of hours. When the flow of composition urges the writer's rapid pen, when the inspiration of a congenial subject kindles the artist's mind and lends deftness to his touch, when the orator is borne onwards on the swift tide of successful speech, when the trial is proceeding on whose issue life or death is suspended, when the decisive engagement, big with the fate of nations, is being lost or won — these, and such as these, are occasions on which time is not reckoned by physical measures, on which intensity of thought and feeling quickens the rate at which life moves.^
I.
The Weight of Affliction.
1. Afflictions never seem light to those who are called upon to bear them. By some remarkable condition of things, heavy afi&ictions may seem light and be accounted as nothing at all, but, naturally and by themselves, we always regard our own afflictions as heavy. It is very easy for spectators to say, when they hear another complaining of sufferings, " Oh ! they are nothing at all, not worth a moment's attention"; and to be ^ J. Caird, University Sermons, 361.
2 COR. IV. 17 . 107
astonished that so much should be made of a little. But spec- tators of suffering may not be the best judges of its weight. In the first place it may be that they are not suffering themselves, and so look at things very comfortably. Then again, men differ as to their sensibility to pain. Circumstances which may be nearly unheeded by one who has but dull sensations may be agony to another more finely constituted. Or again, if both are sensitive, yet one may have a special wound or sore which the other is happily without, and then even the touch of a fly drives to madness. Therefore, when we see another in pain, it is not for us straightway to declare that there is nothing to be pained about. We are all better aware of the stress of our own sorrows than we are of those of other people, and the heart knoweth its own bitterness. Naturally we all feel our afflictions to be heavy.
St. Paul had his afflictions. He did not find the Christian life easy. He was speaking for himself and his companions when he said " We are troubled on every side," " perplexed," " perse- cuted," " cast down," " always delivered unto death." These are not rhetorical phrases which spring to the pen of an eloquent and ready writer. They are words which tell us of hard experiences, harsh treatment, real pain and suffering. In another part of this letter he tells us something more of what he had endured as a Christian. Five times he was beaten by the Jews, thrice by the Eomans. (The strokes of the whip and the rods were not make-believe.) Once he was stoned, thrice he suffered shipwreck. Everywhere perils awaited him — perils of waters, perils of robbers, perils of the Jews, perils of the heathen, perils in the wilderness, perils in the city. He had endured weariness and painfulness, hunger and thirst, cold and nakedness.
2. How can afflictions, naturally heavy, come to be regarded as light ? We know quite well that it is possible for the attention to be so occupied with one thing that it does not notice another. A man engaged in deep thought does not see the friend who recognizes him in the street. A philosopher like Newton may be 80 deeply involved in his problems as to forget the body and its want of food. In the excitement of battle men have not noticed the wound they have received, and not until they have begun to faint from loss of blood have they perceived what has
io8 AN ETERNAL WEIGHT OF GLORY
happened to them. A mind intensely occupied with one thing has little to bestow upon others. We cannot be alive with the same intensity all over. Great concentration of vitality at one point lessens it at others. So that the constitution of our nature points out the direction in which the answer to our question is to be sought. If there be something else of more importance than the pain upon which the attention can be fixed, then, for every degree of such attention there is a degree less of pain ; with almost complete attention upon something else, the pain will very nearly disappear; until, by absorbing devotion to some great thing, it is possible for afflictions which naturally are heavy to become graciously light.