Every one will, I presume, confess to more or less misery. Its apparent
source may be this or that; its real source is, to use a poor figure, a
dislocation of the juncture between the created and the creating life.
This primal evil is the parent of evils unnumbered, hence of miseries
multitudinous, under the weight of which the arrogant man cries out
against life, and goes on to misuse it, while the child looks around for
help--and who shall help him but his father! The Father is with him all
the time, but it may be long ere the child knows himself in his arms.
His heart may be long troubled as well as his outer life. The dank mists
of doubtful thought may close around his way, and hide from him the
Light of the world! cold winds from the desert of foiled endeavour may
sorely buffet and for a time baffle his hope; but every now and then the
blue pledge of a great sky will break through the clouds over his head;
and a faint aurora will walk his darkest East. Gradually he grows more
capable of imagining a world in which every good thing thinkable may be
a fact. Best of all, the story of him who is himself the good news, the
gospel of God, becomes not only more and more believable to his heart,
but more and more ministrant to his life of conflict, and his assurance
of a living father who hears when his children cry. The gospel according
to this or that expounder of it, may repel him unspeakably; the gospel
according to Jesus Christ, attracts him supremely, and ever holds where
it has drawn him. To the priest, the scribe, the elder, exclaiming
against his self-sufficiency in refusing what they teach, he answers,
'It is life or death to me. Your gospel I cannot take. To believe as you
would have me believe, would be to lose my God. Your God is no God to
me. I do not desire him. I would rather die the death than believe in
such a God. In the name of the true God, I cast your gospel from me; it
is no gospel, and to believe it would be to wrong him in whom alone lies
my hope.'