ese patiently and
uncomplainingly,--to acquiesce humbly in the discovery that all this was
always in our hearts, and still is in our hearts--what humility, what
patience, what compassion and pity for ourselves must all that call
forth! The wise nurse is patient with her passionate, greedy, untidy,
disobedient child. She does not cast it out of doors, she does not run
and leave it, she does not kill it because all these things have been and
still are in its sad little heart. Her power for good with such a child
lies just in her pity, in her compassion, and in her patience with her
child. And the child that is in all of us is to be treated in the same
patient, hopeful, believing, forgiving, divine way. We should all be
with ourselves as God is with us. He knoweth our frame. He remembereth
that we are dust. He shows all patience toward us. He does not look for
great things from us. He does not break the bruised reed, nor quench the
smoking flax. He shall not fail nor be discouraged till He have set
judgment in the earth. And so shall not we.

5. And, then,--it is a sufficiently startling thing to say, but--we must
learn to be patient with God also. All our patience, and all the
exercises of it, if we think aright about it, all run up in the long-run
into patience with God. But there are some exercises of patience that
have to do directly and immediately with God and with God alone. When
any man's heart has become fully alive to God and to the things of God;
when he begins to see and feel that he lives and moves and has his being
in God; then everything that in any way affects him is looked on by him
as come to him from God. Absolutely, all things. The very weather that
everybody is so atheistic about, the climate, the soil he labours, the
rain, the winter's cold and the summer's heat,--true piety sees all these
things as God's things, and sees God's immediate will in the disposition
and dispensation of them all. He feels the untameableness of his tongue
in the indecent talk that goes on everlastingly about the weather. All
these things may be without God to other men, as they once were to him
also, but you will find that the truly and the intelligently devout man
no longer allows himself in such unbecoming speech. For, though he
cannot trace God's hand in all the changes of the seasons, in heat and
cold, in sunshine and snow, yet he is as sure that God's wisdom and will
are there as that Scripture is tr