Beside the Still Waters | Page 3

nobler discontent with the world's innumerable wrongs and sufferings! These were God's quiet ways, and the very record of them has disappeared; they survive only in their result. But there is no son in whom mother's blood does not flow, and though now we know not how or where, the Mary of whom the world is ignorant, lived and spoke and died in the Christ, to whom the world looks up.
So no mistake can be greater than to suppose that all the world's best work is done by the eloquent tongue and the busy hand. I will not compare what may be achieved by these means, with the less conspicuous results of a goodness which propagates itself less by word and act than by the unconscious contagion of example; for it is not given to us to choose the form and method of our obedience. The call of conscience is to action; God cannot be acceptably served in inglorious ease. The command comes in many forms: "Work while it is day; the night cometh when no man can work," cries one voice; and then another, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might;" and again a third, "The fields are white unto harvest, but the labourers are few." But God Himself provides a diversity of work for His own purposes, and at the same time a variety of example for us, when He chooses some lives, and laying upon them, what seems to be a heavy burthen of sickness and infirmity, or filling them with a great modesty and retiringness of spirit, or shutting them up within very narrow and insurmountable barriers of circumstance, says to them, in a voice which it is impossible to misinterpret, "Serve Me in darkness and in silence; and let it be enough that I accept the faithfulness which is unknown of men." Sometimes a command like this finds a ready echo in a timid and sensitive spirit, to which it is a deliverance not to be compelled by conscience to go down into the throng of life; quite as often it lies, at least for awhile, like a galling fetter upon the active mind and the eager will. But God tempers His weapons in His own way, and all to the best effect; and presently the busiest and most versatile intellect finds new depths and fresh possibilities of interest in the things that lie closest at home; the widest and the warmest heart learns that faltering feet and feeble hands cannot restrain love's farthest and highest flight; and as for God, with all that is involved in the soul's upward strain towards communion, and His descent of help, He may easily be nearer to the silence of an enforced quietness, than to the noise and press of men's common life. And so it often happens that, under circumstances like these, a character is built up which, if it necessarily shine upon but a few lives, shines for them with a brightness all the purer and more intense. Such virtue is not the beacon flame upon the hill-top, wakening half the land to heroic courage and stern endurance, but the quiet lamp which giveth light to all that are in the house, for sweet patience, and fine courtesy, and the practice of all homely goodness.
Such a life, withdrawn as it is from common temptations, is not without trials and difficulties peculiarly its own; but of these it is not needful now to speak. It is more to my purpose to point out that it is susceptible of a singular symmetry and completeness. The very narrowness which has been imposed upon it by God, and which we are so ready to regard as a privation, is only in another shape the restriction upon the indefiniteness of duty which many dutiful souls so passionately desire. For the claims upon an energetic nature are so many, so various, often so conflicting; it is so hard to know which of two competing duties ought to take precedence, so impossible to adjust effort at precisely its right intensity, and to hit the mean between base self-saving and foolish self-squandering,--that I think it must be a common wish for keen consciences to have the boundaries of industry a little more plainly marked out by God, and to be relieved from the perpetual perplexity of choice. If only one had but a fixed and limited place to fill! If only one could always clearly distinguish between what one ought to do, and what it would be wrong and foolish to attempt! And therefore, in this sense, God's prison may be the soul's liberty, and no round of duty so cheerfully and completely trodden as one which we, who are burthened with too large a capacity of flight, think