Page:National Life and Character.djvu/280

 a preparation! Such a state of society has never been known yet, though the belief in a future life was not held with unwavering certainty in Hellenic and Roman times. It is not easy to realise all that a complete renunciation of these faiths would imply. It is customary to assume that belief in miracles is already held very guardedly by the great mass of educated Protestants. Almost all these suppose miracles in the ordinary acceptation of the term to have ceased with the Apostolic age. Nevertheless, almost every devout Protestant believes firmly that his own life has been so ordered beforehand for good, that every incident may subserve a moral end. Thomas a Kempis tells us in considering the difficult question of temptations to sin, that " divine wisdom and equity weigh the condition and merits of men, and pre-ordain everything so as to fit in with the salvation of the elect." Luther went even further than this, and declared that temptations were the spiritual discipline of the soul; quoting Archbishop Albert of Mainz for the thought commonly ascribed to himself, that the human heart is like millstones, which grind on themselves if they are not supplied with grist, as an instance that the soul needs struggle to take it out of isolation and keep it from feeding upon itself. Sometimes this doctrine has been so applied as to become trivial, and often so as to become extravagant. An old writer tells the story of a Puritan, who having declared that he should perish eternally as certainly as a glass he threw down was shattered, derived great comfort from observing that the glass lay unbroken on the ground. Mr. Keble suggests in very beautiful