I drank in the blessed words without doubt or argument. I was too thirsty to doubt or argue. Some other time I may ask her how she knows this beautiful thing, but not now. All I can do now is to take it into my heart and hold it there.
Roy my own again,—not only to look at standing up among the singers,—but close to me; somehow or other to be as near as—to be nearer than—he was here, really mine again! I shall never let this go.
After we had talked awhile, and when it came time to say good night, I told her a little about my conversation with Deacon Quirk, and what I said to him about the Lord’s will. I did not know but that she would blame me.
“Some time,” she said, turning her great, compassionate eyes on me,—I could feel them in the dark,—and smiling, “you will find out all at once, in a happy moment, that you can say those words with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength; it will come, even in this world, if you will only let it. But, until it does, you do right, quite right, not to scorch your altar with a false burnt-offering. God is not a God to be mocked. He would rather have only the old cry: ‘I believe; help mine unbelief,’ and wait till you can say the rest.
“It has often grated on my ears,” she added, “to hear people speak those words unworthily. They seem to me the most solemn words that the Bible contains, or that Christian experience can utter. As far as my observation goes, the good people—for they are good people—who use them when they ought to know better are of two sorts. They are people in actual agony, bewildered, racked with rebellious doubts, unaccustomed to own even to themselves the secret seethings of sin; really persuaded that because it is a Christian duty to have no will but the Lord’s, they are under obligations to affirm that they have no will but the Lord’s. Or else they are people who know no more about this pain of bereavement than a child. An affliction has passed over them, put them into mourning, made them feel uncomfortable till the funeral was over, or even caused them a shallow sort of grief, of which each week evaporates a little, till it is gone. These mourners air their trouble the longest, prate loudest about resignation, and have the most to say to you or me about our ‘rebellious state of mind.’ Poor things! One can hardly be vexed at them for pity. Think of being made so!”
“There is still another class of the cheerfully resigned,” I suggested, “who are even more ready than these to tell you of your desperate wickedness—”
“People who have never had even the semblance of a trouble in all their lives,” she interrupted. “Yes. I was going to speak of them. Of all miserable comforters, they are the most arrogant.”
“As to real instant submission,” she said presently, “there is some of it in the world. There are sweet, rare lives capable of great loves and great pains, which yet are kept so attuned to the life of Christ, that the cry in the Garden comes scarcely less honestly from their lips, than from his. Such, like the St. John, are but one among the Twelve. Such, it will do you and me good, dear, at least to remember.”
“Such,” I thought when I was left alone, “you new dear friend of mine, who have come with such a blessed coming into my lonely days,—such you must be now, whatever you were once.”
If I should tell her that, how she would open her soft eyes!