'He that believeth shall not make haste,' he said.'There is plenty of time.You must not imagine that the result depends on you, or that a single human soul can be lost because you may fail.The question, as far as you are concerned, is, whether you are to be honoured in having a hand in the work that God is doing, and will do, whether you help him or not.Some will be honoured: shall it be me? And this honour gained excludes no one: there is work, as there is bread in his house, enough and to spare.It shows no faith in God to make frantic efforts or frantic lamentations.Besides, we ought to teach ourselves to see, as much as we may, the good that is in the condition of the poor.'
'Teach me to see that, then,' I said.'Show me something.'
'The best thing is their kindness to each other.There is an absolute divinity in their self-denial for those who are poorer than themselves.I know one man and woman, married people, who pawned their very furniture and wearing apparel to procure cod-liver oil for a girl dying in consumption.She was not even a relative, only an acquaintance of former years.They had found her destitute and taken her to their own poor home.There are fathers and mothers who will work hard all the morning, and when dinner-time comes "don't want any," that there may be enough for their children--or half enough, more likely.Children will take the bread out of their own mouths to put in that of their sick brother, or to stick in the fist of baby crying for a crust--giving only a queer little helpless grin, half of hungry sympathy, half of pleasure, as they see it disappear.The marvel to me is that the children turn out so well as they do; but that applies to the children in all ranks of life.
Have you ever watched a group of poor children, half-a-dozen of them with babies in their arms?'
'I have, a little, and have seen such a strange mixture of carelessness and devotion.'
'Yes.I was once stopped in the street by a child of ten, with face absolutely swollen with weeping, asking me to go and see baby who was very ill.She had dropped him four times that morning, but had no idea that could have done him any harm.The carelessness is ignorance.Their form of it is not half so shocking as that of the mother who will tremble at the slightest sign of suffering in her child, but will hear him lie against his brother without the smallest discomfort.Ah! we shall all find, I fear, some day, that we have differed from each other, where we have done best, only in mode--perhaps not even in degree.A grinding tradesman takes advantage of the over supply of labour to get his work done at starvation prices: I owe him love, and have never thought of paying my debt except in boundless indignation.'
'I wish I had your faith and courage, Mr.Falconer,' I said.
'You are in a fair way of having far more,' he returned.'You are not so old as I am, by a long way.But I fear you are getting out of spirits.Is to-morrow a hard day with you?'
'I have next to nothing to do to-morrow.'
'Then will you come to me in the evening? We will go out together.'
Of course I was only too glad to accept the proposal.But our talk did not end here.The morning began to shine before I rose to leave him; and before I reached my abode it was broad daylight.But what a different heart I carried within me! And what a different London it was outside of me! The scent of the hayfields came on the hardly-moving air.It was a strange morning--a new day of unknown history--in whose young light the very streets were transformed, looking clear and clean, and wondrously transparent in perspective, with unknown shadows lying in unexpected nooks, with projection and recess, line and bend, as I had never seen them before.The light was coming as if for the first time since the city sprang into being--as if a thousand years had rolled over it in darkness and lamplight, and now, now, after the prayers and longings of ages, the sun of God was ascending the awful east, and the spirit-voice had gone forth: 'Arise, shine, for thy light is come.'
It was a well-behaved, proper London through which I walked home.
Here and there, it is true, a debauched-looking man, with pale face, and red sleepy eyes, or a weary, withered girl, like a half-moon in the daylight, straggled somewhither.But they looked strange to the London of the morning.They were not of it.Alas for those who creep to their dens, like the wild beasts when the sun arises, because the light has shaken them out of the world.All the horrid phantasms of the Valley of the Shadow of Death that had risen from the pit with the vaporous night had sunk to escape the arrows of the sun, once more into its bottomless depth.If any horrid deed was doing now, how much more horrid in the awful still light of this first hour of a summer morn! How many evil passions now lay sunk under the holy waves of sleep! How many heartaches were gnawing only in dreams, to wake with the brain, and gnaw in earnest again!
And over all brooded the love of the Lord Christ, who is Lord over all blessed for ever, and shall yet cast death and hell into the lake of fire--the holy purifying Fate.
