the system which made such tranquil lives possible.

Once, it seemed to me, the human accent broke urgently through, when
the preacher spoke of dark hours of spiritual dryness, when the soul
seemed shut out from God--"When we know," he said in heart-felt tones,
"that the Love of God is all about us, but we cannot enter into it; it
seems to be outside of us." Had he indeed suffered thus, this
courteous, kindly priest? I felt that he had, and that he was one of
the sorrowful fellowship.

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