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2
Time as it passes makes a clear glass. We look through it and see things less as they appear when one is in the midst of them, more as God sees them from His eternity, where past, present, future are words unknown. Less than three hundred years can make such a glass. Take the six years between 1644 and 1650 in Scotland. Look at the struggle there, and the bitter suffering. See on one side the soldier, Montrose; on the other the minister, Rutherford.
They never met, never even dreamed that they were one in spirit, for they were in opposite camps, and victory to the soldier inevitably meant heartbreak to the minister. But hear Montrose, betrayed to a death of shame as men miscall such death: “I thank Him I go to heaven with joy the way He paved for me.” Hear the other, when he rises to the higher air where his fellows cannot follow: “A cross of our own choosing, honeyed and sugared with consolations, we cannot have. I think not much of a cross when all the children of the house weep with me and for me; and to suffer when we enjoy the communion of the saints is not much; but it is hard when saints rejoice in the suffering of saints, and redeemed ones hurt (yea, even go nigh to hate) redeemed ones.”
There speaks the man who suffered, just as the other suffered, for something greater than King or country, church or kirk. They met, though they did not know it, in that upper air. And now they are together where all differences of view are forgotten, and the things they fought for are forgotten too. And nothing of those six years seems worth remembering in comparison with that which was noble in the men who fought and struggled and trusted and were betrayed. Not the clash of swords, still less what made them clash, but the temper of those swords matters to us now. For the eternal stuff of history and of life is never found in the thunderclouds of dark enfolding circumstances, but always in the light that pierces the clouds. It is never the material, but always the spiritual that is deathless, and abides.
And so we come back to the thought which underlies this chapter. There is no strength to resist the ravaging lion as he prowls about seeking whom he may devour, unless our hearts have learned to accept the unexplained in our own lives, and the delays and disappointments and reverses which often come where our prayer for others seems to fall into silence and we see not our signs, and all is under snow.