For after all, disguise it from ourselves as we will, we are all girt about with dark mysteries, into which we have to look whether we dare or not.  We fill our life as full as we can of occupation and amusements, of warmth and comfort; yet sometimes, as we sit in our peaceful room, the gust pipes thin and shrill round the corners of the court, the rain rustles in the tree; we drop the book which we hold, and wonder what manner of things we indeed are, and what we shall be.  Perhaps one of our companions is struck down, and goes without a word or sign on his last journey; or some heavy calamity, some loss, some bereavement hangs over our lives, and we enter into the shadow; or some inexplicable or hopeless suffering involves one whom we love, from which the only deliverance is death; and we realize that there is no explanation, no consolation possible.  In such moments we tend to think that the world is a very terrible place, and that we pay a heavy price for our share in it.  How unsubstantial then appear our hopes and dreams, our little ambitions, our paltry joys!  In such a mood we feel that the most definite creed illumines, as it were, but a tiny streak of the shadowy orb; and we are visited, too, by the fear that the more definite the creed, the more certain it is that it is only a desperate human attempt to state a mystery which cannot be stated, in a world where all is dark.

In such a despairing mood, we can but resign ourselves to the awful Will of God, who sets us here, we know not why, and hurries us hence, we know not whither.  Yet the very sternness and inexorability of that dread purpose has something that sustains and invigorates.  We look back upon our life, and feel that it has all followed a plan and a design, and that the worst evils we have had to bear have been our faithless terrors about what should be; and then we feel the strength that ebbed from us drawing back to sustain us; we recognize that our present sufferings have never been unbearable, that there has always been some residue of hope; we read of how brave men have borne intolerable calamities, and have smiled in the midst of them, at the reflection that they have never been so hard as was anticipated; and then we are happy if we can determine that, whatever comes, we will try to do our best, in our small sphere, to live as truly and purely as we can, to practise courage and sincerity, to help our fellow-sufferers along, to guard innocence, to guide faltering feet, to encourage all the sweet and wholesome joys of life, to be loving, tender-hearted, generous, to lift up our hearts; not to be downcast and resentful because we do not understand everything at once, but humbly and gratefully to read the scroll as it is unrolled.