Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/358

 came CALAMITY!--suddenly arose the SOUL! Degradation of name, and with it dignity of nature! How poor, how slight, how insignificant William Losely the hanger-on of rural Thanes compared with that William Waife whose entrance into this house, you--despite that felon's brand when you knew it was the martyr's glory,--greeted with noble reverence; whom, when the mind itself was stricken down--only the soul left to the wreck of the body--you tended with such pious care as he lay on--your father's bed! And do you, who hold Nobleness in such honour--do you, of all men, tell me that you cannot recognise that Celestial tenderness which ennobled a Spirit for all Eternity?"

"George, you are right," cried Darrell; "and I was a blockhead and blunderer, as man always is when he mistakes a speck in his telescope for a blotch in the sun of a system."

GEORGE MORLEY.--"But more difficult it is to recognise the mysterious agencies of Heavenly Love when no great worldly adversity forces us to pause and question. Let Fortune strike down a victim, and even the heathen cries, 'This is the hand of God!' But where Fortune brings no vicissitude; where her wheel runs smooth, dropping wealth or honours as it rolls--where Affliction centres its work within the secret, unrevealing heart--there, even the wisest man may not readily perceive by what means Heaven is admonishing, forcing, or wooing him nearer to itself. I take the case of a man in whom Heaven acknowledges a favoured son. I assume his outward life crowned with successes, his mind stored with opulent gifts, his nature endowed with lofty virtues; what an heir to train through the brief school of earth for due place in the ages that roll on for ever! But this man has a parasite weed in each bed of a soul rich in flowers;--weed and flowers intertwined, stem with stem--their fibres uniting even deep down to the root.

"Can you not conceive with what untiring vigilant care Heaven will seek to disentangle the flower from the weed?--how (let me drop inadequate metaphor)--how Heaven will select for its warning chastisements that very error which the man has so blent with his virtues that he holds it a virtue itself?--how, gradually, slowly, pertinaciously, it will gather this beautiful nature all to itself--insist on a sacrifice it will ask