He did not leave the place for six weeks.Every day he went to the burn, as he called it, with his New Testament; every day tried yet again to make out something more of what the Saviour meant.By the end of the month it had dawned upon him, he hardly knew how, that the peace of Jesus (although, of course, he could not know what it was like till he had it) must have been a peace that came from the doing of the will of his Father.From the account he gave of the discoveries he then made, I venture to represent them in the driest and most exact form that I can find they will admit of.When I use the word discoveries, I need hardly say that I use it with reference to Falconer and his previous knowledge.They were these:--that Jesus taught--First,--That a man's business is to do the will of God:
Second,--That God takes upon himself the care of the man:
Third,--Therefore, that a man must never be afraid of anything;and so,Fourth,--be left free to love God with all his heart, and his neighbour as himself.
But one day, his thoughts having cleared themselves a little upon these points, a new set of questions arose with sudden inundation--comprised in these two:--'How can I tell for certain that there ever was such a man? How am I to be sure that such as he says is the mind of the maker of these glaciers and butterflies?'
All this time he was in the wilderness as much as Moses at the back of Horeb, or St.Paul when he vanishes in Arabia: and he did nothing but read the four gospels and ponder over them.Therefore it is not surprising that he should have already become so familiar with the gospel story, that the moment these questions appeared, the following words should dart to the forefront of his consciousness to meet them:--'If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.'
Here was a word of Jesus himself, announcing the one means of arriving at a conviction of the truth or falsehood of all that he said, namely, the doing of the will of God by the man who would arrive at such conviction.
The next question naturally was: What is this will of God of which Jesus speaks? Here he found himself in difficulty.The theology of his grandmother rushed in upon him, threatening to overwhelm him with demands as to feeling and inward action from which his soul turned with sickness and fainting.That they were repulsive to him, that they appeared unreal, and contradictory to the nature around him, was no proof that they were not of God.But on the other hand, that they demanded what seemed to him unjust,--that these demands were founded on what seemed to him untruth attributed to God, on ways of thinking and feeling which are certainly degrading in a man,--these were reasons of the very highest nature for refusing to act upon them so long as, from whatever defects it might be in himself, they bore to him this aspect.He saw that while they appeared to be such, even though it might turn out that he mistook them, to acknowledge them would be to wrong God.But this conclusion left him in no better position for practice than before.
When at length he did see what the will of God was, he wondered, so simple did it appear, that he had failed to discover it at once.
Yet not less than a fortnight had he been brooding and pondering over the question, as he wandered up and down that burnside, or sat at the foot of the heather-crowned stone and the silver-barked birch, when the light began to dawn upon him.It was thus.
