2
2
“When heaven is about to confer a great office on a man it always first exercises his mind and soul with suffering, and his body to hunger, and exposes him to extreme poverty, and baffles all his undertakings. By these means it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and enables him to do acts otherwise not possible to him,” wrote Mencius, the Chinese sage, two thousand years ago; and the illustration of the Chladni plate beautifully shows how these agitating circumstances can be caused to work together. You sprinkle sand on a brass plate fixed on a pedestal, and draw a bow across the edge of the plate, touching it at the same time with two fingers. Then, because of this touch, the sand does not fall into confusion but into an ordered pattern like music made visible. Each little grain of sand finds its place in that pattern. Not one grain is forgotten and left to drift about unregarded.
There is nothing in the vibrations of the bow to make a pattern. Suffering, hunger, poverty, baffling circumstances cannot of themselves make anything but confusion. But if there be the touch of the Hand, all these things work together for good, not for ill, not for discord, but for something like the harmony of music.
So the ruin is not out of sight, and thoughts wander round it at times: If it be loss, there is still an aching absence; if it be difficult circumstances, they still dominate the landscape; if it be limitations, they still confine us. “Let me exaggerate nothing,” wrote Amiel as he contemplated his ruin, “my liberty is negative. Nobody has any hold over me, but many things have become impossible to me, and if I were so foolish as to wish for them, the limits of my liberty would soon become apparent. Therefore I take care not to wish for them, and not to let my thoughts dwell on them. I only desire what I am able for, and in this way I run my head against no wall. I cease even to be conscious of the boundaries which enclose me. I take care to wish for rather less than is in my power, that I may not even be reminded of the obstacles in my way. Renunciation is the safeguard of dignity. Let us strip ourselves, if we would not be stripped.”
But to stop there is to lose all. What if the crash of hopes, the heartbreak, this that piles itself up as the ruin in the picture of life, does truly make more manifest what our Book calls the Beauty of the Lord? If that be so, we should not wait till we are where life’s poor ruins will appear as the tumbled bricks of a child’s castle before we let our hearts take comfort from such words as these: “I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” Rotherham understands God’s thoughts to mean His plans: “I know the plans which I am planning for you, plans of welfare and not of calamity, to give you a future and a hope.” Thoughts of peace for our prayers, for our intercessions for others which seem to be ineffective (“When He had heard, He abode two days still in the same place where He was”); a future and a hope for the prayers that we feared were covered by the snow, and for those others that appeared to fall to earth like the falling stars that break and scatter into nothingness as we watch them—even those prayers are folded up in the thoughts of peace that He thinks toward us.
These words are for us. We may take them though they were spoken to another people in another age. All the green fields of the Scriptures are for all the sheep of His pasture; none are fenced off from us. Our Lord and Saviour, that great Shepherd of the sheep, Himself led the way into these fields, as a study of His use of the Old Testament shows. His servants, the writers of the New Testament, followed Him there; and so may we. The words of the Lord about His thoughts of peace are for us as well as for His ancient people Israel.
Hammer this truth out on the anvil of experience—this truth that the loving thoughts of God direct and perfect all that concerneth us; it will bear to be beaten out to the uttermost. The pledged word of God to man is no puffball to break at a touch and scatter into dust. It is iron. It is gold, that most malleable of all metals. It is more golden than gold. It abideth imperishable forever. If we wait till we have clear enough vision to see the expected end before we stay our mind upon Him who is our Strength, we shall miss an opportunity that will never come again: we shall never know the blessing of the unoffended. Now is the time to say, “My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise,” even though as we say the words there is no sense of exultation. “It is possible to gather gold, where it may be had, with moonlight,” by which I understand something less helpful than daylight would be in the search and the finding of gold. By moonlight, then, let us gather our gold.