My mother thought the explanation was that God granted us only those things that were good for us: and that always He knew best.
“Papa and I,” she confided to me, “so often kneel and pray that business may improve, and that He will bless papa's enterprises, so that our burthen may be lighter. But things don't seem to get any better.”
God tried us in the furnace. But whatever happened we must always believe in Him. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”
But why then all this fuss about faith, if He did not really mean it? And why did He think things were not good for us that were good for other people? It was not till long after, when I came across an old diary of my mother's, that I learnt how hard had been the struggle for bare existence during those last years of my father's life. But I knew that we were poor. I remember how tired my mother would get, walking, and yet would never take the omnibus. She promised she would always do so when our ship came home. Sometimes, I could not help feeling angry with God for showering favours upon others while being so stingy, as it were, to us. There was a white-whiskered old gentleman, who occasionally asked us to tea, a Mr. Wood, with fat fingers and a great gold chain, of whom God must have been particularly fond. He rode in a carriage and pair, and had servants to wait upon him. He told me once it was God who had given him everything. God had “prospered” him. He had lately built God a chapel, and as a result was richer than ever. My father had built a chapel, mostly out of his own money, when he was a young man. True, it was only a little one, compared with Mr. Wood's great red-brick edifice off the Bow Road; and God had apparently forgotten it, altogether.
For in those days, among religious folk, there was no doubt that God gave all things literally: the good things of this world as well as of the next. I remember a hymn I learnt at Sunday school:
“Whene'er I take my walks abroad,
How many poor I see.
How grateful should I be to God
For all His gifts to me.”
I was to praise God that I was well fed and warmly clad, while others wore but filthy rags, and begged from door to door. God ordered all things, and was satisfied with them, presumably.