This is what I would believe of God—that He is not our censorious and severe critic, but our champion and lover, not loving us in spite of what we are, but because of what we are; Who in the days of our strength rejoices in our joy, and does not wish to overshadow it, like the conscientious human mentor, with considerations that we must yet be withered like grass; and Who, when the youthful ebullience dies away, and the spring grows weak, and we wonder why the zest has died out of simple pleasures, out of agreeable noise and stir, is still with us, reminding us that the wisdom we are painfully and surely gaining is a deeper and more lasting quality than even the hot impulses of youth.
Once in my life have I conceived what might have been, if I had had the skill to paint it, an immortal picture. It was thus. I was attending a Christmas morning service in a big parish church. I was in a pew facing east; close to me, in a transept, in a pew facing sideways, there sat a little old woman, who had hurried in just before the service began. She was a widow, living, I afterwards learnt, in an almshouse hard by. She was old and feeble, very poor, and her life had been a series of calamities, relieved upon a background of the hardest and humblest drudgery. She had lost her husband years ago by a painful and terrible illness. She had lost her children one by one; she was alone in the world, save for a few distant and indifferent relatives. To get into the almshouse had been for her a stroke of incredible and inconceivable good fortune. She had a single room, with a tiny kitchen off it. She had very little to say for herself; she could hardly read. No one took any particular interest in her; but she was a kindly, gallant, unselfish old soul, always ready to bear a hand, full of gratitude for the kindnesses she had received—and God alone knows how few they had been.
She had a small, ugly, homely face, withered and gnarled hands; and she was dressed that day in a little old bonnet of unheard-of age, and in dingy, frowsy black clothes, shiny and creased, that came out of their box perhaps half-a-dozen times a year.
But this morning she was in a festal mood. She had tidied up her little room; she was going to have a bit of meat for dinner, given her by a neighbour. She had been sent a Christmas card that morning, and had pored over it with delight. She liked the stir and company of the church, and the cheerful air of the holly-berries. She held her book up before her, though I do not suppose she was even at the right page. She kept up a little faint cracked singing in her thin old voice; but when they came to the hymn "Hark, the herald angels sing," which she had always known from childhood, she lifted up her head and sang more courageously:
"Join the triumph of the skies!
With the angelic host proclaim,
Christ is born in Bethlehem!"
It was then that I had my vision. I do not know why, but at the sight of the wrinkled face and the sound of the plaintive uplifted voice, singing such words, a sudden mist of tears came over my eyes. Then I saw that close behind the old dame there stood a very young and beautiful man. I could see the fresh curling hair thrown back from the clear brow. He was clothed in a dim robe, of an opalescent hue and misty texture, and his hands were clasped together. It seemed that he sang too; but his eyes were bent upon the old woman with a look, half of tender amusement, and half of unutterable lovingness. The angelic host! This was one of that bright company indeed, going about the Father's business, bringing a joyful peace into the hearts of those among whom he moved. And of all the worshippers in that crowded church he had singled out the humblest and simplest for his friend and sister. I saw no more that day, for the lines of that presence faded out upon the air in the gleams of the frosty sunshine that came and went among the pillars. But if I could have painted the scene, the pure, untroubled face so close to the old worn features, the robes of light side by side with the dingy human vesture, it would be a picture that no living eye that had rested on it should forget.
Alas, that one cannot live in moments of inspiration like these! As life goes on, and as we begin perhaps to grow a little nearer to God by faith, we are confronted in our own lives, or in the life of one very near us, by some intolerable and shameful catastrophe. A careless sin makes havoc of a life, and shadows a home with shame; or some generous or unselfish nature, useful, beneficent, urgently needed, is struck down with a painful and hopeless malady. This too, we say to ourselves, must come from God; He might have prevented it if He had so willed. What are we to make of it? How are we to translate into terms of love what seems like an act of tyrannous indifference, or deliberate cruelty? Then, I think, it is well to remind ourselves that we can never know exactly the conditions of any other human soul. How little we know of our own! How little we could explain our case to another, even if we were utterly sincere! The weaknesses of our nature are often, very tenderly I would believe, hidden from us; we think ourselves sensitive and weak, when in reality we are armed with a stubborn breastplate of complacency and pride; or we think ourselves strong, only because the blows of circumstance have been spared us. The more one knows of the most afflicted lives, the more often the conviction flashes across us that the affliction is not a wanton outrage, but a delicately adjusted treatment. I remember once that a friend of mine had sent him a rare plant, which was set in a big flower-pot, close to a fountain-basin. It never throve; it lived indeed, putting out in the spring a delicate stunted foliage, though my friend, who was a careful gardener, could never divine what ailed it. He was away for a few weeks, and the day after he was gone, the flower-pot was broken by a careless garden-boy, who wheeled a barrow roughly past it; the plant, earth and all, fell into the water; the boy removed the broken pieces of the pot, and seeing that the plant had sunk to the bottom of the little pool, never troubled his head to fish it out. When my friend returned, he noticed one day in the fountain a new and luxuriant growth of some unknown plant. He made careful inquiries and found out what had happened. It then came out that the plant was in reality a water-plant, and that it had pined away in the stifling air for want of nourishment, perhaps dimly longing for the fresh bed of the pool.
Even so has it been, times without number, with some starving and thirsty soul, that has gone on feebly trying to live a maimed life, shut up in itself, ailing, feeble. There has descended upon it what looks at first sight like a calamity, some affliction unaccountable and irreparable; and then it proves that this was the one thing needed; that sorrow has brought out some latent unselfishness, or suffering energised some unused faculty of strength and patience.
But even if it is not so, if we cannot trace in our own lives or the lives of others the beneficent influence of suffering, we can always take refuge in one thought. We can see that the one mighty and transforming power on earth is the power of love; we see people make sacrifices, not momentary sacrifices, but lifelong patient renunciations, for the sake of one whom they love; we see a great and passionate affection touch into being a whole range of unsuspected powers; we see men and women utterly unconscious of pain and weariness, utterly unaware that they are acting without a thought of self, if they can but soothe the pain of one dear to them, or win a smile from beloved lips; it is not that the selfishness, the indolence, is not there, but it is all borne away upon a mighty stream, as the river-wrack spins upon the rising flood.
If then this marvellous, this amazing power of love can cause men to make, with joy and gladness, sacrifices of which in their loveless days they would have deemed themselves and confessed themselves wholly incapable, can we not feel with confidence that the power, which lies thus deepest in the heart of the world, lies also deepest in the heart of God, of Whom the world is but a faint reflection? It cannot be otherwise. We may sadly ponder, indeed, why the love that has been, or that might have been, the strength of weary lives should be withdrawn or sternly withheld, but we need not be afraid, if we have one generous impulse for another, if we ever put aside a delight that may please or attract us, for the sake of one who expects or would value any smallest service—and there are few who cannot feel this—we need not then, I say, doubt that the love which we desire, and which we have somehow missed or lost, is there waiting for us, ours all the time, if we but knew it.