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Veils are thin things, and can be woven from very fine threads; such a trifle as the kind of night that makes a golden text of the words “There shall be no night there” can be a busy weaver. “Oh, how different is battle from the speculations of those who meditate amid the columns of the cloister!” Many have echoed that Crusader. Nothing could have allured us from our field. Had anyone tried to persuade us to consider some cleaner, nicer, brighter sphere, we would have turned on him:
Yours are only the drum and the fife,
The golden braid and the surface of life;
Ours is the red-hot war.
But now that the wave of war has swept us up on some deserted shore where there is nothing to do (as it seems) but suffer a while, it is different. We can pray? When we can, we are more than content. But there are times when we cannot; at least, we cannot attempt sustained prayer. We are often unhappily conscious that we are believed to be praying more than we truly are. For we cannot gather our thoughts to pray; they scatter like a flock of goats on an Indian road which has neither hedge nor ditch, and we cannot run after them. Discouragement will try to turn weaver then.
It is good to remember that we are not alone on this barren coast; like every other form of temptation, this that afflicts us is common to man. If others have found a way of peace here, we may. Jesus called a little child unto Him and set him in the midst of them. Set a little child in the midst of your thoughts. See it when it is ill. It cannot say much to its mother, but it can “look” its love, and the mother understands. The frequent little looks of love passing between mother and child, the frequent little touches of love, these are the signs of love. The Maker of mothers is not less understanding than the mothers He has made. “O more than mother’s heart, I come, a weary child, to Thee.”
And as we come a score of times a day, and as often by night, perhaps not so much praying as just looking, remembering (“I will remember Thee upon my bed”), now and then will rise unbidden “sweet words according to the feeling, either loving or worshiping or wondering, or otherwise sounding as the heart liketh.” And He whom our soul loveth “showeth His privy jewels, much thing He giveth and more He promiseth, and courteous dalliance He showeth.”