day
after he was gone, the flower-pot was broken by a careless garden-boy,
who wheeled a barrow roughly past it; the plant, earth and all, fell
into the water; the boy removed the broken pieces of the pot, and seeing
that the plant had sunk to the bottom of the little pool, never troubled
his head to fish it out. When my friend returned, he noticed one day in
the fountain a new and luxuriant growth of some unknown plant. He made
careful inquiries and found out what had happened. It then came out that
the plant was in reality a water-plant, and that it had pined away in
the stifling air for want of nourishment, perhaps dimly longing for the
fresh bed of the pool.

Even so has it been, times without number, with some starving and
thirsty soul, that has gone on feebly trying to live a maimed life, shut
up in itself, ailing, feeble. There has descended upon it what looks
at first sight like a calamity, some affliction unaccountable and
irreparable; and then it proves that this was the one thing needed; that
sorrow has brought out some latent unselfishness, or suffering energised
some unused faculty of strength and patience.

But even if it is not so, if we cannot trace in our own lives or the
lives of others the beneficent influence of suffering, we can always
take refuge in one thought. We can see that the one mighty and
transforming power on earth is the power of love; we see people
make sacrifices, not momentary sacrifices, but lifelong patient
renunciations, for the sake of one whom they love; we see a great and
passionate affection touch into being a whole range of unsuspected
powers; we see men and women utterly unconscious of pain and weariness,
utterly unaware that they are acting without a thought of self, if they
can but soothe the pain of one dear to them, or win a smile from beloved
lips; it is not that the selfishness, the indolence, is not there, but
it is all borne away upon a mighty stream, as the river-wrack spins upon
the rising flood.

If then this marvellous, this amazing power of love can cause men to
make, with joy and gladness, sacrifices of which in their loveless
days they would have deemed themselves and confessed themselves wholly
incapable, can we not feel with confidence that the power, which lies
thus deepest in the heart of the world, lies also deepest in the heart
of God, of Whom the world is but a faint reflection? It cannot be
otherwise. We may sadly ponder, indeed, why the love that ha