Page:Val d'Arno (Ruskin, 1890).djvu/270

236 to it which He permits; nor will you respect the law less, because, accepting only the obedience of love, it neither hastily punishes, nor pompously rewards, with what men think reward or chastisement. Not always under the feet of Korah the earth is rent; not always at the call of Elijah the clouds gather; but the guarding mountains for ever stand round about Jerusalem, and the rain, miraculous evermore, makes green the fields for the evil and the good.

280. And if you will fix your minds only on the conditions of human life which the Giver of it demands, "He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" you will find that such obedience is always acknowledged by temporal blessing. If, turning from the manifest miseries of cruel ambition, and manifest wanderings of insolent belief, you summon to your thoughts rather the state of unrecorded multitudes, who laboured in silence, and adored in humility, widely as the snows of Christendom brought memory of the Birth of Christ, or her spring sunshine, of His Resurrection, you may know that the promise of the Bethlehem angels