“Ah, why do they?” said Mrs Dorothy. “Man is always wronging God. Not one of us all is so cruelly misunderstood of his fellows as all of us misunderstand Him.”
“Yet He forgives,” said Phoebe softly: “and sometimes we don’t.”
“He is always forgiving, Phoebe. The inscription is graven not less over the throne in Heaven than over the cross on earth,—‘This Man receiveth sinners.’”
There was a pause of some minutes; and as Phoebe rose to go, Mrs Dorothy said,—
“I will tell you one thing I have noted, child, as I have gone through life. Very often there has been something looming, as it were, before me that I had to do, or thought I should have to bear,—and in the distance and the darkness it took a dread shape, and I looked forward to it with terror. And when it has come at last, it has often—I say not always, but often—proved to be at times a light and easy cross, even at times an absolute pleasure. Again, there hath often been something in the future that I have looked forward to as a great good and delight, which on its coming hath turned out a positive pain and evil. ’Tis better we should not know the future, dear Phoebe. Our Father knows every step of the way: is not that enough? Our Elder Brother hath trodden every step, and will go with us through the wilderness. Perfect wisdom and perfect love have prepared all things. Ah, child, thy fathers were wise men to sing as they sang—
“‘Mon sort n’est pas à plaindre,
Il est à désirer;
Je n’ai plus rien à craindre,
Car Dieu est mon Berger.’”
“But, Mrs Dolly— I suppose it can’t be so, yet—it does seem as if there were some things in life which the Lord Jesus did not go through.”
“What things, my dear?”
“Well, we never read of His having any kind of sickness for one thing.”
“Are you sure of that? ‘Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses,’ looks very like the opposite. You and I have no idea, Phoebe, how He spent thirty out of thirty-three years of His mortal life. He may—mind, I don’t say it was so, for I don’t know—but He may have spent much of them in a sick chamber. He was ‘in all points tempted like as we are.’ My father used to tell me that the word there rendered ‘tempted’ signifies not only temptations of Satan, but trials sent of God.”