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The psalms are full of Songs of Pause for times of snow. Such songs are not jocund. There is no dancing with the daffodils. That comes afterwards. But there is trust. The Songs of Pause are songs of trust. And as these Songs of Pause enter into the quieted soul and fill it with peace, the snow loses its power to chill and to crush.
There is peace in this picture of snow, and beneath it is the nurturing of life. And so at last we come to something exultant:
O ye Frost and Cold, O ye Ice and Snow, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever. And out of the silence of the snow we shall hear the voice of the words, but we shall see no similitude; only we shall hear a voice.
There are some for whom snow must mean such dense darkness that the mind cannot conceive of any light piercing through. As well hope to cage a rainbow and carry it down to them. Behold I am the Lord, the God of all flesh, is there anything too hard for Me? Ah, Lord God, behold, Thou hast made the heaven and the earth by Thy great power and stretched-out arm, and there is nothing too hard for Thee. I know that Thou canst do everything. And yet?
That unspoken question has racked many a heart, especially when some distress has made the thought of others in greater distress intolerable. We forget that something good may be happening for their help, something almost unbelievably good:
Through the dark and silent night
On Thy radiant smiles I dwelt;
And to see the dawning light
Was the keenest pain I felt.
That was written by Madame Guyon, who suffered in every sensitive fiber of her being. The words may seem too high for earth. But it is not for us to set a limit to what God is prepared to do when He is training a soul to endure, not accepting deliverance.
Still, these far-flying words were written three hundred years ago. Wonderful things happened then. A letter, slipped into a book by mistake less than twenty years ago, has lately reappeared as such things kindly do sometimes. It was written from Auckland Castle soon after Mrs. Moule’s death had left the Bishop very lonely, for his daughter Tesie had died a little while before, and his only other child was married. He writes of comfort “dropped like an anodyne from the hand of the Physician into my great wound. (He gives no anesthetics, but He does give anodynes.) I bless Him who is more near and dear to me than ever, in His mercy. My beloved one is not far from me. And I bless her Lord for calling her to go upstairs, and meet Him there, and our Tesie with Him, and for trusting me to meet the solitude here, and to find Him very near in it.”
So near is the eternal Comforter that the strangely un-Christian view of death of our half-pagan age does not come into the picture at all. The wife is not “lost.” She is just “upstairs.”
The same thought moves in an older letter written to a daughter about her mother. “She is now above the Winter with a little change of place, not of a Saviour; only she enjoyeth Him now without messages, and in His own immediate presence, from whom she heard by letters and messengers before.” Her joy is like the joy “of finding the first summer rose.”
Those who think like that know the way to the wells where Bunyan drank. They do not speak of the “alarming illness” of a fellow pilgrim. Such illness is “an arrow with a point sharpened with love let easily into the heart.” “Lamented death” is a phrase they never use; and they no more dream of “going into mourning” when a friend puts on immortality than the flowers dream of darkening their fair colors when one of their number is gathered. (Black here, while There, “Lo, as they entered they were transfigured; and they had raiment put on that shone like gold!”) If only we cared to drink of those wells, we should see more clearly, and perhaps almost hear the bells of the City ring to welcome the travelers thereto.
The letter from a lonely study in a lonely house with its gentle “no anesthetic but anodynes” will waken echoes in many a land. And those echoes will repeat the older word: “Because Thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise Thee. Because Thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of Thy wings will I rejoice.” What to our eyes is a very pit of darkness is to those children of His love only the shadow of His wings.
From the Further East a letter came to this house last mail. It was written in a prison house of pain, the kind by common consent most dreaded, but it does not make one think of a somber life under snow but of snow in sunshine, as our picture shows it, or even the sparkle where here and there the sunlight picks out a crystal. Enclosed in that letter is a quotation from a song written by a leper. His hands are gone and he writes with a pen tied on to the poor remnant of an arm: “To the heart aglow for Thee,” he wrote, “the Valley of the Shadow is like sunrise on the sea.” O Lord, Thou art wonderful. Thou canst make a radiance anywhere. There is nothing too hard for Thee.