The religious man takes things as they come, but how? In a reverent and filial spirit, a spirit that obeys and trusts because God has ordained.He refers, behind the event, to the will that declares it.And yet, this will be no formal lifeless resignation.He will not be stripped of his manhood, or become unnatural in his religion.His resignation will not be the cold assent of reason, or the mere rote and repetition of the lips.No, it will be born in struggling and in sorrow.Religion is not a process that makes our nature callous to all fierce heats or drenching storms.Neither is he the most religious man who is calmest in the keen crisis of trouble.I say in the crisis of trouble-for to human vision there always is a crisis.We cannot penetrate to the secret determinations of God, and in the season of care and affliction there is a time when the issue is uncertain,-when we cannot say it is sealed.What shall we do then? Is human agency nothing? Grant that we are driving down a stream,-can we use no effort? Is there not a time when deeds, struggles, prayers, are of some avail?-when the spirit, in its intense agony, with swollen strength and surging tears, heaves against the catastrophe, if yet, perchance, it may ward it off? Truly, there is such a time, and the humblest disciple of Christ may weep as he also wept.But let him also strive as Christ strove.Let him not dash his grief in rebellious billows to the throne;let not his groans arise in resentful murmurs; let the remembrance of what God is and why he does, be with him, and let the filial, reverent trust steal in,-"Not my will, but thine be done." That reference to God, that obedience to him, rising from the very depths of sorrow, and clung to without faltering, is RESIGNATION.It shall bestow peace and victory in the end.O! how different from that sullen fatalism that lets things come as they will.To such a soul things do come as they will, and it hardens under them,-they do come as they will, but it sees not, cares not, why they come.No thought goes up beyond the cloud to God,-no strength is born that shall make life's trials lighter,-no love and faith that will seek the Father's hand in the darkest hour, and shed an enduring light over the thorny path of affliction, and upon the bosom of the grave.Look at these two.Outwardly, their calmness may be the same.Nay, the one may evince emotion and tears, while the other shall stand rigid in the hour of calamity, with a bitter smile, or a frown of endurance.But in the one is strength, in the other rigidity; in the one is power to triumph over sorrow, in the other only nervous capacity to resist it.The one is man hardened to indifference, sullen because of irreligion, upon whom some sorrow will one day fall that will peel him to the quick, and he will not know where to flee for healing.
The other is man contending against evil, yet not against God,-man with all the tenderness and strength of his nature, impressible yet unconquerable, walking with feet that bleed among the wounding thorns, and a heart that shrinks from the heavy woe, yet, all lacerated as he is, able to walk through, because he holds by the hand of Omnipotence.The one is the unbending tree, peeled by the lightning and stripped by the North wind, lifting its gnarled head in sullen defiance to the storm, which, when the storm does overcome it, shall be broken.The other also is rooted in strength, and meets the rushing blast with a lofty front.But as "it smiles in sunshine, so it bends in storm," trustful and obedient, yet firm and brave, and nothing shall overwhelm it.
