I can only cry—“O Lord, in Thee have I trusted, let me never be confounded. Wherefore should the wicked say—Where is now his God?” But while I fret most there comes to me an inner voice, saying—“What matter if thou art confounded. God is not. Only believe firmly that God is as good as thou with thy finite reason canst conceive; and He will make thee at last able to conceive how good He is, and thou shalt have the perfect blessing of seeing God.” You will say I am inconsistent. So I am; and so, if read honestly, are
David’s Psalms. Yet, that very inconsistency is what brings them home to every human heart for ever. The words of a man in real doubt and real darkness, crying for light, and not crying in vain, as I trust I shall not.
. . . I only know that I know nothing, but hope that Christ, who is the Son of Man, will tell me piecemeal, if I be patient and watchful, what I am and what man is.
Letters and Memories.
Some things I see clearly, and hold with desperate clutch—a Father in Heaven for all; a Son of God incarnate for all (that incarnation is the one fact which is to me worth all, because it makes all others possible and rational, and without it I should go mad); and a Spirit of the Father
and the Son, the fountain of all good on earth—who works to will and to do of His own good pleasure—in whom? In every human being in whom there is one spark of active good, the least desire to do right, or to be of use. Beyond that I see little save that Right is divine and all-conquering—Wrong utterly infernal, and yet weak, foolish, a mere bullying phantom, which will flee at each brave blow, had we courage to strike at it in God’s name.
Letters and Memories.
There is not a sorrow which man can taste which Jesus Christ has not fulfilled. He filled the cup of misery to the brim, and drained it to the dregs. He tasted death for every man, and went down into the lowest depths of terror and shame and agony and death, and, worst of all, into the feeling that
God had forsaken Him; that there was no help or hope for Him in heaven, as well as earth; in a word, He went down into hell; even into that lowest darkness where, for one moment, a man feels, that God is nothing to him, and he is nothing to God. Even into that depth Jesus condescended to go down for us. That worst of all temptations, of which David only tasted a drop, when he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—Jesus drained to the very dregs for us. He went down into hell for us, and conquered hell and death, and the darkness of the unknown world, and rose again glorious from them, that He might teach us not to fear death and hell; that He might know how to comfort us in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment,
when on our sick-bed, or in some bitter shame and trouble, the lying devil is telling us that we are damned and lost, and forsaken by God, and every sin we ever did rises up and stares us in the face.