To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind fury with the abhorrèd shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.”
INVOCATION AND INACTION.
Exodus xiv. 15.
With the Red Sea close before them, and with Pharaoh and his host close behind them, what were the children of Israel to do? Was it for this that Moses had brought them out of the house of bondage, which yet had its fleshpots and creature comforts after all? What were they to do? They lifted up their eyes, and saw the sea in front, and the enemy in the rear; and then they lifted up their voice in querulous fear and expostulation. Should they go back? Then Moses lifted up his voice, and bade them stand still, and they should see a great deliverance. But the will of God was not that they should either go back, or stand still and merely look on. For “the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.” Invocation may be excellent in itself, but, as a concomitant, inaction mars it. A hallowed thing is prayer; but to pray and sit still, when the need is to go forward and push on, is the sign or stigma of feeble folk.
When Nelson told the King of Naples, in plain terms, that he had his choice—either to advance, trusting to God for His blessing on a just cause, and prepared to die sword in hand; or to remain quiet, and be kicked out of his kingdom; the king made answer that he would go on, and trust in God and Nelson. Of the same stuff as Nelson, but his superiors in moral character and in practical recognition of Him that is Holy, Holy, Holy, as well as Lord God Almighty, were those early English navigators, characterized by a modern pen as “indomitable God-fearing men, whose life was one great liturgy.” “The ice was strong, but God was stronger,” says one of Frobisher’s men, after grinding a night and a day among the icebergs; not waiting for God to come down and split them, but toiling through the long hours, himself and the rest fending off the vessel with poles and planks, with death glaring at them out of the rocks, and so saving themselves and it. We read in Turell’s Life of Dr. Benjamin Colman, “that reverend father in our New England Israel,” as Mr. Lowell calls him, that when the vessel in which he had taken passage for England was attacked by a French privateer, he “fought like a philosopher and a Christian, ... and prayed all the while he charged and fired.” His the practice was, if not on his lips the maxim, to pray to God and keep his powder dry. It is expressly noted of the Maid of Orleans, in the Procès on record, that while she rather evaded the question of resorting to miraculous aids and appliances, and of affecting supernatural power, she “used the Gallic proverb, Ayde-toi, Dieu te aydera.”