to him all these years? Was it not the life of God that inspired
his whole frame? By the loss and restoration in one part, he would
understand possession in the whole.

But as the withered and restored limb to the man, so is the maimed and
healed man to his brethren. In every man the power by which he does the
commonest things is the power of God. The power is not _of us_. Our
power does it; but we do not make the power. This, plain as it is,
remains, however, the hardest lesson for a man to learn with conviction
and thanksgiving. For God has, as it were, put us just so far away
from Him that we can exercise the divine thing in us, our own will, in
returning towards our source. Then we shall learn the fact that we are
infinitely more great and blessed in being the outcome of a perfect
self-constituting will, than we could be by the conversion of any
imagined independence of origin into fact for us--a truth no man _can_
understand, feel, or truly acknowledge, save in proportion as he has
become one with his perfect origin, the will of God. While opposition
exists between the thing made and the maker, there can be but discord
and confusion in the judgment of the creature. No true felicitous vision
of the facts of the relation between his God and him; no perception of
the mighty liberty constituted by the holy dependence wherein the will
of God is the absolutely free choice of the man; no perception of a
unity such as cannot exist between independent wills, but only in
unspeakable love and tenderness between the causing Will and the caused
will, can yet have place. Those who cannot see how the human will should
be free in dependence upon the will of God, have not realized that the
will of God made the will of man; that, when most it pants for freedom,
the will of man is the child of the will of God, and therefore that
there can be no natural opposition or strife between them. Nay, more,
the whole labour of God is that the will of man should be free as his