Scene of righteousness and love;
And, whate’er thou need’st below,
He thou trustest will bestow.”
LXXXVI.
WHAT WE KNOW NOT NOW WE SHALL KNOW HEREAFTER.
STRANGE how natural it is for each individual to feel that there are no troubles, no sorrows, so severe as his own! How ready we are to feel that if the lessons our Father is teaching us were such as others around us were learning, we could surely bear them with fortitude!
The mother whom we spoke of in the last article, like many more who fully understand her difficulties,—for they are passing over the same rough road,—felt her trust and faith failing; yea, would “gladly lie down and die,” before half her threescore years and ten were accomplished, might she escape the responsibility of teaching her children, and using her best faculties (no one is asked to do any more) to train them up into noble men and women. The task appeared so hard, the way so long, and her faith so weak!
Now another mother claims, at least, our fullest sympathy,—a Rachel, “mourning for her children, and refusing to be comforted, because they are not.” One after another has been taken from her, and each one at “the most interesting age.”
When is this “most interesting” age? Can a mother draw the line? In early babyhood the precious gift nestles in her bosom, and lives entirely through her life,—so dependent on her for every care and comfort, that no one else can attempt to supply her place. Utterly helpless as the babe is, when the mother realizes how necessary to its life is her ceaseless watchfulness, can there be any period when it will be so interesting, so dear to her heart, as now, in this state of complete dependence?
But slowly it emerges from this helpless condition. Its first recognition, its first smiles and playfulness, are all bewitching. What can be more lovely? A few weeks pass, and it can sit alone; then it begins to creep; now, with what absorbing interest the first steps are watched, and commented upon with a pride and earnestness as if no child ever did all these things before. The mother’s heart is overflowing with love and tenderness; but God calls, and the lovely babe is forever hid from her sight.
How can she bear it? Whose sorrow was ever like unto hers? Why is it that God has sent this trial? What lesson can be taught by it, that will do half the good which that child’s presence would have accomplished? What is there in the care, the anxieties of watching over its maturing, which can be thought a hardship? How joyfully would this mother bear all this, if the life of her child might have been spared! She longs to lie down and die, not because of the responsibility which she knows would have increased with every added year,—she could have trusted her Father to give her strength sufficient for those duties. Her faith and trust fail, because God took her child from her, and in her anguish she cries, “Why am I thus bereaved?” In answer to these sad questions we can only say, “What ye know not now ye shall know hereafter.” In the first bitterness of this grief, there is nothing more to be said.