The immediate result of it all is that the work which I can do and desire to do, and which, if anything, I seem to have been sent into the world to do, is delayed and hindered.  No good can come out of the things which I am going to spend the hours in trying to mend.  Neither will any of the people concerned profit by my example in the matter, because they will only have their confidence in my judgment and amiability diminished.

And so I walk, as I say, along the sandy lanes, with the fresh air and the still sunlight all about me, kept by my own unquiet heart from the peace that seems to be all about me within the reach of my hand.  The sense of God’s compassion for his feeble creatures does not help me; how can he compassionate the littleness for which he is himself responsible?  It is at such moments that God seems remote, careless, indifferent, occupied in his own designs; strong in his ineffable strength, leaving the frail and sensitive creatures whom he has made, to whom he has given hopes and dreams too large for their feeble nerves and brains, to stumble onwards over vale and hill without a comforting smile or a sustaining hand.  Would that I could feel otherwise!  He gives us the power of framing an ideal of hopefulness, peace, sweetness, and strength; and then he mocks at our attempts to reach them.  I do not ask to see every step of the road plainly; I only long to know that we are going forwards, and not backwards, I must submit, I know; but I cannot believe that he only demands a tame and sullen submission; rather he must desire that I should face him bravely and fearlessly, in hope and confidence, as a loving and beloved son.

V

How often in sermons we are exhorted to effort!  How rarely are we told precisely how to begin!  How glibly it is taken for granted that we are all equally capable of it.  Yet energy itself is a quality, a gift of temperament.  The man who, like Sir Richard Grenville, says “Fight on,” when there is nothing left to fight with or to fight for, except that indefinable thing honour, or the man who, like Sir Andrew Barton, says: 

    “I’ll but lie down and bleed awhile,
    And then I’ll rise and fight again;”—­

they are people of heroic temper, and cannot be called a common species.  “Do the next thing,” says the old motto.  But what if the next thing is one of many, none of them very important, and if at the same time one has a good book to read, a warm fire to sit by, an amusing friend to talk to?  “He who of such delights can judge, and spare to interpose them oft, is not unwise,” says Milton.  Most of us have a certain amount of necessary work to do in the world, and it can by no means be regarded as established that we are also bound to do unnecessary work.  Supposing that one’s heart is overflowing with mercy, compassion, and charity, there are probably a hundred channels in which the stream can flow; but that is only because a good many