the customary path,
and confined myself to fixed moments of prayer, I gained very little
benefit. I do not forego the practice of liturgical attendance even
now; for a solemn service, with all the majesty of an old and beautiful
building full of countless associations, with all the resources of
musical sound and ceremonial movement, does uplift and rejoice the
soul. And even with simpler services, there is often something vaguely
sustaining and tranquillising in the act. But the deeper secret lies
in the fact that prayer is an attitude of soul, and not a ceremony;
that it is an individual mystery, and not a piece of venerable pomp. I
would have every one adopt his own method in the matter. I would not
for an instant discourage those who find that liturgical usage uplifts
them; but neither would I have those to be discouraged who find that it
has no meaning for them. The secret lies in the fact that our aim
should be a relation with the Father, a frank and reverent confidence,
a humble waiting upon God. That the Father loves all his children with
an equal love I doubt not. But he is nearest to those who turn to him
at every moment, and speak to him with a quiet trustfulness. He alone
knows why he has set us in the middle of such a bewildering world,
where joy and sorrow, darkness and light, are so strangely
intermingled; and all that we can do is to follow wisely and patiently
such clues as he gives us, into the cloudy darkness in which he seems
to dwell.

XXIX

The Death-bed of Jacob

I heard read the other morning, in a quiet house-chapel, a chapter
which has always seemed to me one of the most perfectly beautiful
things in the Bible. And as it was read, I felt, what is always a test
of the highest kind of beauty, that I had never known before how
perfect it was. It was the 48th chapter of Genesis, the blessing of
Ephraim and Manasses. Jacob, feeble and spent, is lying in the quiet,
tranquil passiveness of old age, with bygone things passing like dreams
before the inner eye of the spirit--in that mood, I think, when one
hardly knows where the imagined begins or the real ends. He is told
that his son Joseph is coming, and he strengthens himself for an
effort. Joseph enters, and, in a strain of high solemnity, Jacob
speaks of the promise made long before on the stone-strewn hills of
Bethel, and its fulfilment; but even so he seems to wander in his
thought, the recollection of his Rachel comes ove