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to define its employment? Life is like a sea on which floats a ship bound for no port. But there is a quick weariness in aimless drifting, and liberty becomes a burden when the higher demands of life are left unsatisfied. What wonder if they touch everything, and exhaust nothing! And where lies the remedy? Solely in a conscientious Will that chooses and persistently pursues some permanent object, or some large self-culture-some work that will not fail, that may be continued from day to day, every day deepening their tracks-some moral interest, some line of life, the thread of which need not be broken, but lead on, however gently, farther and farther-for not violent efforts, but only continuous ones, are demanded for the truest culture of our nature. Their place is in the centre of all that is human, and their first duty is to do what offers within their own circle; but it is a waste of life for a spiritual being not to have some large interest or purpose that can continuously be pursued in the leisure that God affords.

There is the correspondent period, when the worth of a man's life yet hangs in doubt-when he ought to ask himself before God what it is that he expects from existence, and entertain great thoughts of what may be open to him, if he does not spoil his future by early purposelessness and retributive incapacity. For there are golden opportunities in life if he will wait for them, and be found fit to seize them when they come: an

existence rich in all needful means, in all lawful power, for those who by purity, by self-control and patient growth, are ready when God calls. I suppose few men have passed middle life without feeling that great occasions have passed out of their hands because of deficiencies in what was abundantly possible to them; perhaps because they had not laid wider and deeper the foundations of knowledge, and held the intellectual instruments more completely at command. We speak of the good fortune that appears in some men's lives; but for the most part, the good fortune falls to the strong will, the patient diligence, the faithful preparation, that can use the opportunity and is equal to the time.

And let us live in no doubt of what is strength and what is weakness. It is strength to will and to do it is weakness to desire and not to do-to wish and not to will to wish to break a habit and still live in itto wish to fix the thoughts and let them wander-to wish for the command of a faculty and to acquire no efficient use of it. And strength is not the vehement impulse of one part of us, but the final consent of all that is in us. It is not in the tenderness of a yielding man: nor in the resignation of a cold one; nor in the prudence of a selfish man: nor in the open-handedness of a spendthrift. The tender must be firm the resigned, loving: the prudent, generous: the charitable, self-denying. It was seen in Christ when the morning

of his greatest glory dawned upon him—watching in trembling and in prayer-in his humility testing his weakness, and collecting his strength in God. Remember what he said to his disciples, who all failed him in that great crisis, not because their hearts were evil, but simply because their Wills were feeble: "What, could you not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak."

And let us not fall into the vulgar mistake that there is any strength in restless action, unless that action comes forth from earnest thoughtfulness and has been fed by the inspirations of God. There is a constitutional activity which is often weaker and poorer than silent contemplation. Have the devout strength of meditation that passes outwards into life when the heart muses till the fire burns. For then we are strong in the Lord and in the power of His might : feeling that He who inspires us will also endow us for that which He requires-that He asks no service for which He does not supply the sufficiency-and that to those who will yield themselves to do His Will, without self-seeking or ambition, "their strength is ever as their day."

XXIII.

Disquiet of Spirit.

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PSALM xlii. 5:

Why art thou cast down, oh my soul! and why art thou disquieted within me?"

THERE is a large amount of spiritual disquiet, of the causes of which the soul may be ignorant; even as there is a large amount of bodily suffering having its origin in some invisible derangement of a frame fearfully and wonderfully made, in laws and conditions of health the existence of which is a mystery to the sufferer. A morbid condition of body is for the most part not occasioned by external stroke or violence; its cause must be detected amid the complicated workings of the powers of life: and a morbid condition of spirit is for the most part not occasioned by assignable calamity, but by some defect of co-operative action in the springs of thought and feeling that make the sum of spiritual being. External injury, definable affliction, are our exceptional experiences: internal derangement, irregular exercise, disproportioned development of the powers of life, are constant sources of

uneasiness, permanent violations of the conditions on which God gives the fulness of peace.

There is another analogy of great practical importance between spiritual and bodily disquiet. In neither case will ignorance of the laws of health save us from the consequences of their violation. We may err unknowingly, but no less do the natural results ensueno less has that suffering to be borne which is the natural issue of mistaken action. God in the natural world withholds no train of sorrowful effects because man incurs them unawares: if we touch the deathcharged element, however innocently, no decree interposes to arrest the prompt instruction of a terrible experience; and though the spiritual penalty of sinfulness falls only on wilful transgression, yet if we fail to keep the conditions on which God gives quiet, our ignorance of what those conditions are will not affect the result the fulness of peace is annexed to certain conditions and to no other, and the disturbance which visits involuntary imperfection is often our first index to a broken law. How often does it happen, both in the moral and in the economic world, that we knew not there was a vice in our state of being until it came to light in an issue of suffering, and we were made aware of the root of evil by the fruit of woe! It is the final cause of all such corrective fruit that we should act upon the warning and discover what law of God has been neglected. There is a physiology of

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