Miss Clifford seemed quenched and humbled by these words; her enthusiasm faded away and she looked at Helen with a deprecatory air as she replied:
"Don't say that! I never felt so unfit for anything but to sit at the feet of Christ's disciples and learn of them."
Yet I, so many years one of those disciples, been sitting at her feet, and had learned of her. Never had I so realized the magnitude of the work to be done in this world, nor the power and goodness of Him who has undertaken to do it all. I was glad to be alone, to walk my room singing praises to Him for every instance in which, as my Physician, He had "disappointed my hope and defeated my joys" and given me to drink of the cup of sorrow and bereavement.
MAY 24.-I read to Ernest the extract from Fenelon which has made such an impression on me.
"Every business man, in short every man leading an active life, ought to read that," he said. "We should have a new order of things as the result. Instead of fancying that our ordinary daily work was one thing and our religion quite another thing, we should transmute our drudgery into acts of worship. Instead of going to prayer-meetings to get into a 'good frame' we should live in a good frame from morning till night, from night till morning, and prayer and praise would be only another form for expressing the love and faith and obedience we had been exercising amid the pressure of business."
"I only wish I had understood this years ago," I said. "I have made prayer too much of a luxury, and have often inwardly chafed and fretted when the care of my children, at times, made it utterly impossible to leave them for private devotion-when they have been sick, for instance, or in other like emergencies. I reasoned this way: 'Here is a special demand on my patience, and I am naturally impatient. I must have time to go away and entreat the Lord to equip me for this conflict.' But I see now that the simple act of cheerful acceptance of the duty imposed and the solace and support withdrawn would have united me more fully to Christ than the highest enjoyment of His presence in prayer could."
"Yes, every act of obedience is an act of worship," he said.
"But why don't we learn that sooner? Why do we waste our lives before we learn how to live?"
"I am not sure," he returned, "that we do not learn as fast as we are willing to learn. God does not force instruction upon us, but when we say, as Luther did, 'More light, Lord, more light,'—the light comes."
I questioned myself after he had gone as to whether this could be true of me. Is there not in my heart some secret reluctance to know the truth, lest that knowledge should call to a higher and holier life than I have yet lived?