The text was that verse about “all things working together for good to them that love God;” but, whatever the original discourse had been, it wandered off into a subject which all who knew the minister recognized as one perpetually close to his heart—­submission to the will of God, whatever that will might be, and however incomprehensible it seemed to mortal eyes.

“Not, my friends,” said he, after speaking for a long time on this head —­speaking rather than sermonizing, which, like many cultivated but not very original minds, he was too prone to do—­“not that I would encourage or excuse that weak yielding to calamity which looks like submission, but is, in fact, only cowardice; submitting to all things as to a sort of fatality, without struggling against them, or trying to distinguish how much of them is the will of God, and how much our own weak will; daunted by the first shadow of misfortune, especially misfortunes in our worldly affairs, wherein so much often happens for which we have ourselves only to blame.  Submission to man is one thing, submission to God another.  The latter is divine, the former is often merely contemptible.  But even to the Almighty Father we should yield not a blind, crushed resignation, but an open-eyed obedience, like that we would fain win from our own children, desiring to make of them children, not slaves.

“My children—­for I speak to the very youngest of you here, and do try to understand me if you can, or as much as you can—­it is right —­it is God’s will—­that you should resist, to the very last, any trial which is not inevitable.  There are in this world countless sorrows, which, so far appears, we actually bring on ourselves and others by our own folly, wickedness, or weakness—­which is often as fatal as wickedness; and then we blame providence for it, and sink into total despair.  But when, as sometimes happens, His heavy hand is laid upon us in a visible, inevitable misfortune which we can not struggle against, and from which no human aid can save us, then we ought to learn His hardest lesson—­to submit.  To submit—­yet still, while saying ‘Thy will be done,’ to strive, so far as we can, to do it.  If He have taken from us all but one talent, even that, my children, let us not bury in a napkin.  Let us rather put it out a usury, leaving to Him to determine how much we shall receive again; for it is according to our use of what we have, and not of what we have not, that He will call us ‘good and faithful servants,’ and at last, when the long struggle of living shall be over, will bid us ‘enter into the joy of our Lord.’”

When the minister sat down, he saw, as he had seen consciously or unconsciously, all through the service, and above the entire congregation, those two large intent eyes fixed upon him from the Cairnforth pew.

Children of ten years old do not usually listen much to sermons, but the little earl had heard very few, for it was difficult to take him to church without so many people staring at him.  Nevertheless, he listened to this sermon, so plain and clear, suited to the capacity of ignorant shepherds and little children, and seemed as if he understood it all.  If he did not then, he did afterward.