It was too terrible! Here was a schism at the very root of his being. The love of things was closer to him than the love of God. Between him and God rose the rude bulk of a castle of stone! He crept out of bed, laid himself on his face on the floor, and prayed in an agony. The wind roared and howled, but the desolation in his heart made of the storm a mere play of the elements. How few of my readers will understand even the possibility of such a state! How many of them will scorn the idea of it, as that of a man on the high road to insanity!
“God,” he cried, “I thought I knew thee, and sought thy will; and I have sought thy will in greater things than this wherein I now lie ashamed before thee. I cannot even pray to thee. But hear thou the deepest will in me, which, thou knowest, must bow before thine, when once thou hast uttered it. Hear the prayer I cannot offer. Be my perfect Father to fulfil the imperfection of thy child. Be God after thy own nature, beyond my feeling, beyond my prayer—according to that will in me which now, for all my trying, refuses to awake and arise from the dead. O Christ, who knowest me better a thousand times than I know myself, whose I am, divinely beyond my notions of thee and me, hear and save me eternally, out of thy eternal might whereby thou didst make me and give thyself to me. Make me strong to yield all to thee. I have no way of confessing thee before men, but in the depth of my thought I would confess thee, yielding everything but the truth, which is thyself; and therefore, even while my heart hangs back, I force my mouth to say the words—Take from me what thou wilt, only make me clean, pure, divine. To thee I yield the house and all that is in it. It is thine, not mine. Give it to whom thou wilt. I would have nothing but what thou choosest shall be mine. I have thee, and all things are mine.”
Thus he prayed, thus he strove with a reluctant heart, forcing its will by the might of a deeper will, that would be for God and freedom, in spite of the cleaving of his soul to the dust.
Then for a time thought ceased in exhaustion. When it returned, lo! he was in peace, in the heart of a calm unspeakable. How it came he could not tell, for he had not been aware of its approach; but the contest was over, and in a few minutes he was fast asleep—ten times his own because a thousand times another’s—one with him whom all men in one could not comprehend, whom yet the heart of every true child lays hold upon and understands.
I would not have it supposed that, although the crisis was past, there was no more stormy weather.
Often it blew a gale—often a blast would come creeping in—almost always in the skirts of the hope that God would never require such a sacrifice of him. But he never again found he could not pray. Recalling the strife and the great peace, he made haste to his master, compelling the refractory slave in his heart to be free, and cry, “Do thy will, not mine.” Then would the enemy withdraw, and again he breathed the air of the eternal.
When a man comes to the point that he will no longer receive anything save from the hands of him who has the right to withhold, and in whose giving alone lies the value of possession, then is he approaching the inheritance of the saints in light, of those whose strength is made perfect in weekness. But there are those who for the present it is needless to trouble any more than the chickens about the yard. Their hour will come, and in the meantime they are counted the fortunate ones of the earth.
CHAPTER XLVI.
A REST.
But now James Gracie fell sick. They removed him therefore from the men’s quarters, and gave him Cosmo’s room, that he might be better attended to, and warmer than in his own. Cosmo put up a bed for himself in his father’s room, and Grizzie and Aggie slept together; so now the household was gathered literally under one roof—that of the kitchen-tower, as it had been called for centuries.
James’s attack was serious, requiring much attention, and involving an increase of expenditure which it needed faith to face. But of course Cosmo did not shrink from it: so long as his money lasted, his money should go. James himself objected bitterly to such waste, as he called it, saying what remained of his life was not worth it. But the laird, learning the mood the old man was in, rose, and climbed the stair, and stood before his bed, and said to him solemnly, “Jeames, wha are ye to tell the Lord it’s time he sud tak ye? what kin’ o’ faith is ’t, to refuse a sup, ’cause ye see na anither spunefu’ upo’ the ro’d ahin’ ’t?”