Beside the Still Waters | Page 2

and imperfect way) sweet and pure, and perhaps, in the course of ages, urge it a little nearer the throne of God. Is the faith of Christendom sustained from generation to generation by the succession of heroes and saints, to whose achievements all men look up with despairing admiration, and in whose acknowledged and recorded excellence they see the full embodiment of their own desire, or by the thousand nameless fidelities to duty, and obscure victories of self-devotion, and hidden glories of purity, that pass away without celebration? If you, my brethren, have any stoutness of heart to resist mean temptation, if you are conscious of any uplifting of desire towards better and more stable things than form the common stuff of life, if any quiet trust in God sustains you amid the world's chance and change, to what do you owe them? In the last resort, doubtless, to God Himself, and to God working through Christ; but immediately, and in a large measure, to hidden forces, unseen influences, which you perhaps can track only in part, but of which others know nothing. A father's integrity--a mother's sweet goodness--the quiet air of a happy home--a domestic courage and patience, at which you have looked very closely, and whose every line and lineament you know--some ancestral saintliness, which is a household tradition and no more, but which has never withered in the fierce light of public estimate,--these things have inspired and nourished your nobler part. They are the refreshing dew and the fertilizing rain, the restful night and the kindling day, of God's moral world. We grow up with them, and hardly know them for His activity; they are among the necessary conditions of our existence; and when we seek for tokens of Him, it is rather in the crises and catastrophes of life--in the sharp wound that pricks a sleeping conscience, in the call of duty which turns the whole current of our energy, in the sorrow which destroys for ever our trust in the world. But He has been with us all the while in the gentler motions of His will.
Sometimes, I am inclined to think, we insist too much on our own estimate of small and great in the moral world, forgetting that any single fact or individual life is but one link in an endless chain of causes and consequences, of which we ought to know the whole before we can rightly estimate a part. And looking back where some light seems to rest upon our own or others' history, it is easy to see how what we should call great and signal, stands next in the line of causation to what seems (but only seems) to be trivial, and is certainly obscure. Let us take the most remarkable instance of all,--the Christ, whom no scepticism can dethrone from the foremost place in human history,--who, whatever else he was, must be admitted even by unbelief to have set his mark upon mankind more deeply than any other son of men. Yet how he emerges upon the world out of secrecy and silence! Whatever bright cloud of hope and prophecy had formerly floated about his cradle, has long been scattered and forgotten; and he comes, from his Galilean hills, one of the simple folk who earned their bread in the sweat of their brow, unlearned save in the ancestral wisdom of his people, unheralded but by the village estimate of a sweet and innocent life, to finish the work of a long line of prophets, and to lift humanity nearer to God. And we are often so eager to prove the singularity of his mission, and to take him out of the category of other workers for God, as to miss the great lesson which is to be learned of the way in which the Father always trains and educates a faithful and victorious Son. Of his mother, who knows anything, save what the few hints and statements of the Evangelists disclose? A superstition, not without its tender and graceful side, has taken her from her cottage home at Nazareth, and crowned her Queen of Heaven; till all the familiar extravagances of mythology have obliterated even from men's imagination the lines of a sweet and strong human character. And yet what a marvellous woman must have been this unknown mother of Christ! What depth of tenderness, what steadiness of judgment, what a majestic and yet winning purity, what a faculty of self-devotion (not yet too hardly tried), what a simple intensity of devoutness, must have watched and helped the child, as he grew and blossomed into man! What airs from heaven must have blown about that lowly roof, filling all who dwelt beneath it with a noble simplicity of content with their own lot, and one, with a