I will take life
whole, not divide it into pieces and choose. My grief shall be like
a silent chapel, lit with holy light, into which I shall often
enter, and bend, not to frame mechanical prayers, but to submit
myself to the still influence of the shrine. It is all my own now,
a place into which no other curious eye can penetrate, a guarded
sanctuary. My sorrow seems to have plucked me with a strong hand
out of the swirling drift of cares, anxieties, ambitions, hopes;
and I see now that I could not have rescued myself; that I should
have gone on battling with the current, catching at the river
wrack, in the hopes of saving something from the stream. Now I am
face to face with God; He saves me from myself, He strips my ragged
vesture from me and I stand naked as He made me, unashamed,
nestling close to His heart.
April 3, 1891.
A truth which has come home to me of late with a growing intensity
is that we are sent into the world for the sake of experience, not
necessarily for the sake of immediate happiness. I feel that the
mistake we most of us make is in reaching out after a sense of
satisfaction; and even if we learn to do without that, we find it
very difficult to do without the sense of conscious growth.
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