Prayer is the only refuge against the Walpurgis-dance of the witches and the fiends, which at hapless moments whirl unbidden through a mortal brain.
Two Years Ago, chap. xix. 1856.
England’s Forgotten Worthies. October 31.
Among the higher-hearted of the early voyagers, the grandeur and glory around them had attuned their spirits to itself and kept them in a lofty, heroical, reverent frame of mind; while they knew as little about what they saw in an “artistic” or “critical” point of view as in a scientific one. . . . They gave God thanks and were not astonished. God was great: but that they had discovered long before they came into the tropics.
Noble old child-hearted heroes, with just romance and superstition enough about them to keep from that prurient hysterical wonder and enthusiasm which is simply, one often fears, a product of our scepticism! We do not trust enough in God, we do not really believe His power enough, to be ready, as they were, as every one ought to be on a God-made earth, for anything and everything being possible; and then when a wonder is discovered we go into ecstasies and shrieks over it, and take to ourselves credit for being susceptible of so lofty a feeling—true index, forsooth, of a refined and cultivated mind!!
Smile if you will: but those were days (and there never were less superstitious ones) in which Englishmen believed in the living God, and were not ashamed to acknowledge, as a matter of course, His help, and providence, and calling, in the matters of daily life, which we now, in our covert atheism, term “secular and carnal.”
Westward Ho! chap. xxiii.
SAINTS’ DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
OCTOBER 18.
St. Luke, Physician and Evangelist.
It is good to follow Christ in one thing and to follow Him utterly in that. And the physician has set his mind to do one thing—to hate calmly, but with an internecine hatred, disease and death, and to fight against them to the end. In his exclusive care for the body the physician witnesses unconsciously yet mightily for the soul, for God, for the Bible, for immortality. Is he not witnessing for God when he shows by his acts that he believes God to be a God of life, not of death; of health, not of disease; of order, not of disorder; of joy and strength, not of misery and weakness? Is he not witnessing for Christ when, like Christ, he heals all manner of sickness and disease among the people, and attacks physical evil as the natural foe of man and of the Creator of man?