“Yes, in their different ways and degrees. Would you say that they were hardly treated? Or would you rather suppose that their Father gave them something more and better to do than they had planned for themselves?”
“He must know best, of course: but it does seem hard that that very thing should happen to them. Huber would not have so much minded being deaf, perhaps; or that musical man being blind; or Richard Grant losing his foot, instead of his hand: for he did not want to go round the world.”
“No doubt their hearts often swelled within them at their disappointments: but I fully believe that they found very soon that God’s will was wiser than their wishes. They found, if they bore their trial well, that there was work for their hearts to do, far nobler than any work that the head can do through the eye, and the ear, and the hand. And they soon felt a new and delicious pleasure, which none but the bitterly disappointed can feel.”
“What is that?”
“The pleasure of rousing their souls to bear pain, and of agreeing with God silently, when nobody knows what is in their hearts. There is a great pleasure in the exercise of the body,—in making the heart beat, and the limbs glow, in a run by the sea-side, or a game in the playground; but this is nothing to the pleasure there is in exercising one’s soul in bearing pain,—in finding one’s heart glow with the hope that one is pleasing God.”
“Shall I feel that pleasure?”
“Often and often, I have no doubt,—every time that you can willingly give up your wish to be a soldier or a sailor,—or anything else that you have set your mind upon, if you can smile to yourself, and say that you will be content at home.—Well, I don’t expect it of you yet. I dare say it was long a bitter thing to Beethoven to see hundreds of people in raptures with his music, when he could not hear a note of it. And Huber—”
“But did Beethoven get to smile?”
“If he did, he was happier than all the fine music in the world could have made him.”
“I wonder—O! I wonder if I ever shall feel so.”