Gods Answers | Page 3

and yet the schooling was thorough; things strong often grow as quietly as things feeble. The oak rises as silently in the forest as the lily in the garden. Strong characters, too, under any conditions of life, school themselves much more than they are schooled. Active, inquisitive, resolute, and possessing a fair share of the national perfervidum ingenium, not without some tincture of those elements of the Scottish character known as the "canny" and the "dour," our worker early developed that robust vigour of mind and body which has so long stood the wear and tear of severely trying work.
One passage of significance in the family history deserves notice, especially as suggesting a peculiar feature in her early training and supplying a link in the chain of providential events. In work among the young her father was an enthusiast. With a heart bigger than her own family circle, her mother took in two orphans to foster and rear. Thus in the work of caring for the outcast and the forlorn Annie Macpherson was "to the manner born." Inheriting her father's enthusiasm and her mother's sympathetic nature, the quick-witted, warm-hearted girl would not fail to note the equal footing enjoyed by the stranger children, and would know the reason why: the much tact employed to keep the new and difficult relations sweet would engage her attention; and the exceeding tenderness with which the motherless little ones were treated, would be a very practical Gospel to our young scholar in Christian philanthropy. Were matters sometimes strained? did little jars arise and a shadow now and then gather on the faces of the strangers because their own mother was not? The wise foster-mother would set all right again by some merry quip, some gleesome turn, some one of those playful gleams of humour which furnish a key to the secret of successful work among the young. To be a mother to those orphans, to make life in its duties and joys, as far as possible, the same to them as if they had not lost their own mother, ay, and to teach them to gather the brightest roses from the thorniest bushes, was at once a good work in itself, and a model for one who was destined to similar service, only on an immensely wider scale and on a tenfold more difficult field. The sisterly fostering of the orphans was a providential training for her future life-work. To learn to love and to serve over and above the claims of mere natural affection, could not fail to enlarge the heart and awaken the sympathies of a quick, susceptible child. Little did her mother know what she was doing when she took the orphans to her bosom. She only thought to make a warm home and a bright future for the hapless pair; but in effect she was preparing a warm home and a bright future for thousands of the poorest children on God's earth.
But there was something better in store. Girlish days swept by much as usual--the rapid growth of warm thought and feeling making each revolving year a continuous springtide, an opening summer. At nineteen, Annie Macpherson looked out on a world that always promises more to youthful eyes than it ever fulfils. Eager hope was drawing much on a future whose furthest horizon was Time. Suddenly a shadow fell. A word spoken by a friend was the vehicle of a divine message. A more distant and awful horizon arose to view: Time with its hopes and joys, like a thin mist in early morning, vanished in the light of eternity; and quickly from that young heart, pierced with a new sorrow, went up the prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner!"
How little the world understands that same old prayer. Yonder afar off stands a man who, having trafficked in all iniquity, having matured in wickedness, and perfected himself in the fine art of dodging truth and conscience, is at length found out in the thicket of his own vices by a bull's eye that glares on him like hell. Well it befits such an one, even the world admits, to smite upon his breast and cry for mercy. But for a girl in her teens, an innocent, merry-hearted, pure-minded young thing, to raise a cry for mercy like a very publican or a prodigal, is confounding to the world's sense of propriety and measure in things; and hence that world is angry, and in effect repudiates the need of so much mercy, of so much abasement and urgency in a case like this. The root and rise of this cry for mercy the natural man does not understand; but that soul knows it right well, where the lightnings of Omniscient Holiness have gleamed and the shadows of God's anger