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The memory of the nursery and its book of gold (the technical name for such a book) passes in the glimmering way of such memories into thoughts of another room and another book. The room is very quiet, for the father of the family lies there dying, but the children do not know that yet. They only know that he is ill, and when he asks his eldest child to read to him she finds her way to Samson Agonistes, and to this:
All is best, though we oft doubt,
What th’ unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
And here the reading ended, without a thought that it was the last time father and child would read together, or that the next words to be specially associated with that room would be words of consolation from the God of the widow, “The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; and He knoweth them that trust in Him.”
But Scripture and poem are one with lily bud and the gold leaf in their reticence. The unsearchable operation of Wisdom is still an untracked field, and we are not told why there must be such a day of trouble that if the Lord were not our stronghold we would be overwhelmed.
Sometimes even in reputable writing a strange ignorance speaks up, objecting. A hymn for protection on the sea is sung; the ship of which the singers were thinking is lost at sea. A railway journey is the subject of prayer; the train is derailed—and so on through a crowd of calamities. “How do you account for it?”
We do not attempt to account for it. We only know the outskirts of His ways; and how small a whisper do we hear from Him. As well try to capture the motif of a symphony from a few bars imperfectly heard, or imagine the finished picture after seeing the colors on the palette, or master the argument of the book of Job after reading a few paragraphs, as presume to imagine that we who see only a fragment of the thought of God can understand the whole or interpret it to another. But we shall not be disappointed when we are told the secret of the mysteries of this present. The word stands true: “And ever best found in the close.”
The enemy will contest our confidence at every point; he will remind us of the human cause of our trouble. But faith looks above the human. “They sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver: and they brought Joseph into Egypt....I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt....God did send me before you to preserve life for you; ye thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good....He sent a man before them, even Joseph.”
If our thoughts linger among the brothers and the Ishmaelites we shall miss the precious things that were the portion of Joseph. We shall never be a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over the wall, blessing all who seek them with their shade and fruit. We shall wither like the plants in the desert where no water is. Desperate things can happen—things that are in every way wrong—but faith overlooks the earthly. Faith sees God. Faith can even console those who were the human instruments of the hurt: “Now therefore be not grieved nor angry with yourselves that ye sold me hither....Fear not, I will nourish you and your little ones. And he comforted them and spoke kindly unto them.” Faith worketh by love.
In the earlier years of the work in Dohnavur we were constantly reminded of how there came a messenger unto Job and said....And while he was yet speaking there came also another, and said...—for trouble followed trouble very much after the fashion of those messengers.
One evening, in a brief lull between the messengers, two of us spent an hour with a small telescope looking at the Great Nebula in Orion. As I looked into those deeps of darkness lighted by an infinitely far and faint pale flame, a sense of the eternal came upon me. The world passeth away and the lust thereof, and the grief thereof and the wrong thereof but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever, was the word of that breath of flame. The transitory appeared (as we know it to be) in comparison with the eternal of no account at all. I knew then that the only thing that matters when trouble is appointed is our attitude towards that trouble; and I turned from the telescope to meet the next assault with an entirely new peace. This that I must touch and handle and feel was nothing of real moment. A few days or months or years, and it would be forgotten utterly. But how I touched and handled it, how I felt and acted towards those who caused it—that belonged to the eternal order. It belonged to the things that would abide when earth and the heavens shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shall be folded up.