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Just after Amiel, of whom it was said that he came to his desk as to an altar, received at the hands of his doctors the medical verdict which was his arrêt de mort, he wrote in his Journal Intime, “On waking it seemed to me that I was staring into the future with wide startled eyes. Is it indeed to me that these things apply? Incessant and growing humiliation, my slavery becoming heavier, my circle of action steadily narrower. What is hateful in my situation is that deliverance can never be hoped for, and that one misery will succeed another in such a way as to leave me no breathing space, not even in the future, not even in hope. All possibilities are closed to me, one by one.” And he felt it difficult for the natural man to escape from a dumb rage against all this. (It is indeed not only difficult, it is impossible.) But he found the way of victory over the natural: “One word is worth all others, Thy will, not mine, be done,” and he wrote at last “To will what God wills brings peace.”
But are such things as these which Amiel describes the will of God at all? The honest heart cannot be content with platitudes. “An enemy hath done this” is a word that reaches far and touches more than tares. If an enemy has done it, how can it be called the will of God?