ld's work and pain. Rest is not for those who flee away from life's
difficulties, but for those who face them. 'Take my yoke ... and ye shall
find rest.' It were not well for our own sakes that we had wings. It were
not well for us to be able to avoid the burden-bearing and the tale of
tired days, for God has hidden the secret of our rest in the heart of our
toiling. They who come unto the City of God come there not by the easy
flight of a dove, but by the long, slow pilgrimage of unselfishness.

Yet there is a beauty and a fitness in this longing. It is expressive of
more than the weariness of a world-worn spirit, or the thinly disguised
selfishness of one who fears to pay the price of life.

When the long working-day of life is wearing away its last hours and
verging towards the great stillness, the voices of time fall but faintly on
the ear, the adorations and ideals and fashions and enthusiasms of the
world come to mean little to a man who in his day has followed them as
eagerly as any, and the heart within him asks only for rest.

God, if there be none beside Thee
Dwelling in the light,
Take me out of the world and hide me
Somewhere behind the night.

When, like Simeon the seer with the Christ-Child in his arms, a man feels
that for him life has said its last word and shown its last wonder and
uttered its last benediction, the desire for rest is a pure and spiritually
normal thing; it is just the soul's gaze turned upward where

beyond these toils
God waiteth us above,
To give to hand and heart the spoils
Of labour and of love.

And maybe this mood of which we are thinking may have a not unworthy place
in a strenuous life. As a tired woman pauses amid her tasks and looks out
of her cottage window to take into her heart the quiet beauty of the woods
where she knows the ground is fair with lilies, so do we find ourselves
looking out of life's small casement and thinking upon the fresh, free,
'outdoor' life the soul will some day live. And such a mood as this is
surely a sign of the soul's growth, a testimony of its responsiveness to
the divine touch, a sudden sense of its splendid destiny borne in upon it
among the grey and narrow circumstances of its service.

Oh that I had a dove's swift, silver wings,
I said, so I might straightway leave behind
This strife of tongues, this tramp of feet, and find
A world that knows no struggles and no stings,
Where all abou