This plea for wings does not necessarily betoken ‘a desire to depart.’  It rather indicates a desire to remain under more favourable and comfortable conditions.  Such a mood is not the highest and the healthiest experience of the soul.  It is rather something against which we must fight relentlessly.  Very often the longing for wings results only in lagging footsteps.  Picturing to ourselves the luxury of laying life down will not help us to face the duty of taking life up.  The secret of enervation is found not in the poverty of our resources, but in the cowardliness and selfishness of our attitude towards life.  The battle is half won when we have looked the enemy in the face.  The burden is the better borne as we stoop under the full weight of it.

Oh that I had wings like a dove! That is a short-sighted and a selfish desire.  Supposing you had wings, what would you do?  Fly away from the moil of the world and find rest and shelter for yourself?  Is that the best and noblest thing to desire to do?  After all, we know other and loftier moods than this.  We know that staying is better than going when there is so much to stay for.  We know that working is better than resting when there is so much to do.  We have something better to think about than a quiet lodgement in the wilderness, we who live in a world where the strength of our hands and the warmth of our hearts count for something.  To give your tired brother a lift is a vastly more profitable occupation than sitting at the roadside and wishing you could fly.  Man, you ought to be glad that you can walk—­in a world where there are so many cripples that want help.

Oh that I had wings!... then would I fly away. That desire has never taken any one to heaven, but it has made them less useful upon earth.  The breath of this desire is able to blight the flowers of social service.  No one would be foolish enough to indict suburbanism as a mode of life.  The day must surely come when few or none will dwell in the smoke-grimed heart of the city.  But in as far as a man seeks the fairest suburb open to him in order that he may see little of, and think little of, ’the darkness of the terrible streets,’ then the very life that restores health to his body shall sow seeds of disease in his soul.

There is only one way to rest, and that lies right through the heart of the world’s work and pain.  Rest is not for those who flee away from life’s difficulties, but for those who face them.  ’Take my yoke ... and ye shall find rest.’  It were not well for our own sakes that we had wings.  It were not well for us to be able to avoid the burden-bearing and the tale of tired days, for God has hidden the secret of our rest in the heart of our toiling.  They who come unto the City of God come there not by the easy flight of a dove, but by the long, slow pilgrimage of unselfishness.

Yet there is a beauty and a fitness in this longing.  It is expressive of more than the weariness of a world-worn spirit, or the thinly disguised selfishness of one who fears to pay the price of life.