nt tongue and the busy hand. I will not
compare what may be achieved by these means, with the less conspicuous
results of a goodness which propagates itself less by word and act than
by the unconscious contagion of example; for it is not given to us to
choose the form and method of our obedience. The call of conscience is
to action; God cannot be acceptably served in inglorious ease. The
command comes in many forms: "Work while it is day; the night cometh
when no man can work," cries one voice; and then another, "Whatsoever
thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might;" and again a third,
"The fields are white unto harvest, but the labourers are few." But God
Himself provides a diversity of work for His own purposes, and at the
same time a variety of example for us, when He chooses some lives, and
laying upon them, what seems to be a heavy burthen of sickness and
infirmity, or filling them with a great modesty and retiringness of
spirit, or shutting them up within very narrow and insurmountable
barriers of circumstance, says to them, in a voice which it is
impossible to misinterpret, "Serve Me in darkness and in silence; and
let it be enough that I accept the faithfulness which is unknown of
men." Sometimes a command like this finds a ready echo in a timid and
sensitive spirit, to which it is a deliverance not to be compelled by
conscience to go down into the throng of life; quite as often it lies,
at least for awhile, like a galling fetter upon the active mind and the
eager will. But God tempers His weapons in His own way, and all to the
best effect; and presently the busiest and most versatile intellect
finds new depths and fresh possibilities of interest in the things that
lie closest at home; the widest and the warmest heart learns that
faltering feet and feeble hands cannot restrain love's farthest and
highest flight; and as for God, with all that is involved in the soul's
upward strain towards communion, and His descent of help, He may easily
be nearer to the silence of an enforced quietness, than to the noise and
press of men's common life. And so it often happens that, under
circumstances like these, a character is built up which, if it
necessarily shine upon but a few lives, shines for them with a
brightness all the purer and more intense. Such virtue is not the beacon
flame upon the hill-top, wakening half the land to heroic courage and
stern endurance, but the quiet lamp which giveth light to all that are