We are assuredly meant to
believe that the coward is to learn the beauty of courage, that the
laggard is to perceive the worth of energy, that the selfish man is
to be taught sympathy. If we must take a metaphor, let us rather
think of God as the graver of the gem than as the child that beats
her doll for collapsing instead of sitting upright.
It is our dishonouring thought of God as jealous, suspicious, fond
of exhibiting power, revengeful, cruel, that does us harm. We must
rather think of His Heart as full of courage, energy, and hope; as
teeming with joy, lightness, zest, mirth; and then we can begin to
think of failures, fears, delays as things small and unimportant,
not as malicious ambushes, but as rough bits of road, as obstacles
to reveal and to develop our strength and gaiety. There is no joy
in the world so great as the joy of finding ourselves stronger than
we know; and that is what God is bent upon showing us, and not upon
proving to us that we are vile and base, in the spirit of the old
Calvinist who said to his own daughter when she was dying of a
painful disease, that she must remember that all short of Hell was
mercy.
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