To his brother, a doctor in South Africa.
September 1900.
When I feel what the grace of God has done for my life, what it is doing, what it will do, I can despair of no one else. I am filled with wonder and amazement and thanksgivings and hopes. I am sometimes so thankful that I still live, that in a world of light and dark shadows I can show my faith in God, before the other world dawns with its full day and unclouded brightness—and most of all that I can here and now pray for those whom He has taught me to love. I cannot conceive this world without prayer. It is worth while making any efforts, however desperate, to learn to pray. When the Day dawns, how wonderful it will be to look back and trace the path through which He has led us in the Twilight!
To F. J. C.
Christ's College, Cambridge: 1900.
The more He tries you by His silence, the greater to my mind is the proof that He believes in you. He knows you will come through. He has great work for you to do, and therefore you need a strong perfected faith, and He is trying to give you it.
I am so sorry at what you tell me about prayer. But do go on. When things are at their darkest light comes. After all God knows how much you can bear, and He will not, if you will only persevere, allow you to be utterly confounded. Don't be in the least discouraged at your inability to concentrate your attention. Even a man who had lived in the presence of God for years has told us that
The world that looks so dull all day
Glows bright on me at prayer,
And plans that ask no thought but these,
Wake up and meet me there.
My very flesh has restless fits;
My changeful limbs conspire
With all these phantoms of the mind
My inner self to tire.
Do you expect to fare better, when you are exercising faculties which have been for long more or less dormant? The same man goes on to say—and I think it is a comforting truth—that God sees further than we do, sees what we mean:
These surface troubles come and go,
Like rufflings of the sea;
The deeper depth is out of reach
To all, my God, but Thee.