290 POWER IN WEAKNESS
incident to human nature, fulfils all these conditions, it is not possible with perfect certainty to say.
The Apostle himself is not interested in it as a physical affection. He speaks of it because of its spiritual significance, and because of the wonderful spiritual experiences he has had in connexion with it. It was given him, he says ; but by whom ? When we think of the purpose — to save him from spiritual pride — we instinctively answer, " God." And that, it can hardly be doubted, would have been the Apostle's own answer. Yet he does not hesitate to call it in the same breath " a messenger of Satan." The name is dictated by the inborn, ineradicable shrinking of the soul from pain ; that agonizing, humiliating, annihilating thing we feel at the bottom of our hearts, is not really of God, even when it does His work. In His perfect world pain shall be no more. It does not need science, but experience, to put these things together, and to understand at once the evil and the good of suffering. Paul, at first, like all men, found the evil overpowering. The pain, the weakness, the degradation of his malady, were intolerable. He could not understand that only a pressure so pitiless and humbling would preserve him from spiritual pride and a spiritual fall.
^ Paul's thorn was not pleasant to him. He prayed to be rid of it. But when he found it had come to stay, he made friends with it swiftly. It was no longer how to dismiss, but how to entertain. He stopped groaning, and began glorying. It was clear to him that it was God's will, and that meant new oppor- tunity, new victory, new likeness to Christ. What God means is always too good to be lost, and is worth all it costs to learn. Let us learn as swiftly as we may. Time is short.^
^ We are all slow to learn anything like this. We think we can take warning, that a word will be enough, that at most the memory of a single pang will suffice to keep us safe. But pains remain with us, and the pressure is continuous and unrelieved, because the need of constraint and of discipline is ceaseless. The crooked branch will not bend in a new curve if it is tied to it only for half an hour. The siiiful bias in our natures — to pride, to sensuality, to falsehood, or whatever else — will not be cured by one sharp lesson. The commonest experience in human life is that the man whom sickness and pain have humbled for the moment, the very moment their constraint is lifted, resumes his
1 M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every- Pay Living, 8.
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old habit. He does not think so, but it is really the thorn that has been keeping him right ; and when its sharpness is blunted, the edge is taken from his conscience too.^
3. St. Paul besought the Lord, that is Christ, thrice, that this thing might depart from him. The Lord, we may be sure, had full sympathy with that prayer. He Himself had had His agony, and prayed the Father thrice that, if it were possible, the cup of pain might pass from Him. He prayed, indeed, in express sub- mission to the Father's will ; the voice of nature was not allowed in Him to urge an unconditional peremptory request. Perhaps in St. Paul on this occasion — certainly often in most men — it is nature — the flesh and not the spirit — that prompts the prayer. But God is all the while guarding the spirit's interest as the higher, and this explains the many real answers to prayer which seem to be refusals. A refusal is an answer if it is so given that God and the soul may thenceforth understand one another. It was thus that St, Paul was answered by Christ : " He hath said unto me. My grace is sufi&cient for thee : for [my] power is made perfect in weakness."
The answer is, in form and in substance, a gentle refusal of the form of the petition, but it is a more than granting of its essence. For the best answer to such a prayer, and the answer which a true man means when he prays, " Take away the burden," need not be the external removal of the pressure of the sorrow, but the infusing of power to sustain it. There are two ways of lightening a burden ; one is diminishing its actual weight, the other is increasing the strength of the shoulder that bears it. And the latter is God's way, and Christ's way, of dealing with us,
^ Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men and women. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the rich- ness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.*
^ February 20th, 1870. — This morning, perhaps, I should have begun with my old grumbling, " A weary week," etc. To-night I feel as if I never should grumble again, such a spirit has come on me. It is as if my eyes wea'e opened by God to see the self- spirit pass away, and to be able with a clear glance to read truth.