One word he said that dwells with me, that "Faith overleaps all visible
horizons." That was a golden thought; so that as I walked back in the
cool of the afternoon, and saw the prodigious plain stretch on all
hands, and thought how strangely my own tiny life was limited and
bound, I felt that the message of Christ was a mysterious trust, an
undefined hope; not a mechanical process of forgiveness and atonement,
but an assurance that there is something in the world which calls
lovingly to the soul, and that while we stretch out yearning hands and
desirous hearts to that, we are indeed very near to the unknown Mind of
God.
X
I have often wondered how it has come about that Job has become
proverbial for patience. I suppose that it has arisen out of the verse
in the Epistle of St. James about the patience of Job; but, like the
passage in the Book of Numbers which attributes an extreme meekness to
Moses, it seems to me to be either a very infelicitous description, or
else a case where both adjectives have shifted their meaning. Moses is
notable for an almost fiery vehemence of character, and the punishment
that was laid upon him was the outcome of a display of intemperate
wrath. Just as we associate meekness with the worm that never turns, so
the typically patient animal is the ass who is too phlegmatic to resent
the most unjust chastisement, and ready to accommodate itself to the
most overtaxing burdens.
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