At Large, Arthur Christopher Benson [buy e reader TXT] 📗

when perhaps the hours in which we sat idle, out of misery or mere feebleness, are the most fruitful hours of all for the growth of the soul.

The great savant dies. What is lost? Not a single fact or a single truth, but only his apprehension, his collection of certain truths; not a single law of nature perishes or is altered thereby. We measure worth by prominence and fame; but the destiny of the simplest and vilest of the human race is as august, as momentous as the destiny of the mightiest king or conqueror; it is not our admiration of each other that weighs with God, but our nearness to, our dependence on Him. Yet, even so, we must not deceive ourselves in the matter. We must be sure that it is the peace of God that we indeed desire, and not merely a refined kind of leisure; that we are in search of simplicity, and not merely afraid of work. We must not glorify a mild spectatorial pleasure by the name of philosophy, or excuse our indolence under the name of contemplation. We must abstain deliberately, not tamely hang back; we must desire the Kingdom of Heaven for itself, and not for the sake of the things that are added if we seek it. If the Scribes and Pharisees have their reward for ambition and self-seeking, the craven soul has its reward too, and that reward is a sick emptiness of spirit. And then if we have erred thus, if we have striven to pretend to ourselves that we were careless of the prize, when in reality we only feared the battle, what can we do? How can we repair our mistake? There is but one way; we can own the pitiful fault, and not attempt to glorify it; we can face the experience, take our petty and shameful wages and cast ourselves afresh, in our humiliation and weakness, upon God, rejoicing that we can at least feel the shame, and enduring the chastisement with patient hopefulness; for that very suffering is a sign that God has not left us to ourselves, but is giving us perforce the purification which we could not take to ourselves.

And even thus, life is not all an agony, a battle, an endurance; there are sweet hours of refreshment and tranquillity between the twilight and the dawn; hours when we can rest a little in the shadow, and see the brimming stream of life flowing quietly but surely to its appointed end. I watched to-day an old shepherd, on a wide field, moving his wattled hurdles, one by one, in the slow, golden afternoon; and a whole burden of anxious thoughts fell off me for a while, leaving me full of a quiet hope for an end which was not yet, but that certainly awaited me; of a day when I too might perhaps move as unreflectingly, as calmly, in harmony with the everlasting Will, as the old man moved about his familiar task. Why that harmony should be so blurred and broken, why we should leave undone the things that we desire to do, and do the things that we do not desire, that is still a deep and sad mystery; yet even in the hour of our utmost wilfulness, we can never wander beyond the range of the Will that has made us, and bidden us to be what we are. And thus as I sit in this low-lit hour, there steals upon the heart the message of hope and healing; the scent of the great syringa bush leaning out into the twilight, the sound of the fitful breeze laying here and there a caressing hand upon the leaves, the soft radiance of the evening star hung in the green spaces of the western sky, each and all blending into incommunicable dreams.
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Publication Date: 08-20-2010

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