Some seem to have no desire for good, no dim perception of it. The
outcast child, brought up cruelly and foully, with vile
inheritances, he is not free, as I use the word; sometimes, by some
inner purity and strength, he struggles upwards; most often he is
engulfed; yet it is all a free gift, to me much, to another little,
to some nothing at all. With all my heart do I wish my will to be
in harmony with His. I yield it up utterly to Him. I have no
strength or force, and He withholds them from me. I do not blame, I
only ask to understand; He has given me understanding, and has put
in my heart a high dream of justice and love; why will He not show
me that He satisfies the dream? I say with the old Psalmist, "Lo, I
come," but He comes not forth to meet me; He does not even seem to
discern me when I am yet a long way off, as the father in the
parable discerned his erring son.
Then the Christian teacher says to me that all is revealed in
Christ; that He reconciles, not an angry God to a wilful world, but
a grieved and outraged world to a God who cannot show them He is
love.
Yet Christ said that God was all-merciful and all-loving, and that
He ordered the very falling of a single hair of our heads.
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