t the great
and beautiful gift itself of the child's life and the child's love came
from Him. I do not question His power or His right to take my child
from me. But I endure only because I must, not willingly or loyally or
lovingly. It is not that I feel the injustice of His taking the boy
away; it is a far deeper sense of injustice than that. The injustice
lies in the fact that He made the child so utterly dear and desired;
that He set him so firmly in my heart; this on the one hand; and on the
other, that He does not, if He must rend the little life away and leave
the bleeding gap, send at the same time some love, some strength, some
patience to make the pain bearable. I cannot believe that the love I
bore my boy was anything but a sweet and holy influence. It gave me the
one thing of which I am in hourly need--something outside of myself and
my own interests, to love better than I loved even myself. It seems
indeed a pure and simple loss, unless the lesson God would have us
learn is the stoical lesson of detachment, indifference, cold
self-sufficiency. It is like taking the crutches away from a lame man,
knocking the props away from a tottering building. An optimistic
moralist would say that I loved Alec too selfishly, and even that the
love of the child turned away my heart from the jealous Heart of God,
who demands a perfect surrender, a perfect love. But how can one love
that which one does not know or understand, a Power that walks in
darkness and that gives us on the one hand sweet, beautiful, and
desirable things, and on the other strikes them from us when we need
them most? It is not as if I did not desire to trust and love God
utterly. I should think even this sorrow a light price to pay, if it
gave me a pure and deep trust in the mercy and goodness of God. But
instead of that it fills me with dismay, blank suspicion, fretful
resistance. I do not feel that there is anything which God could send
me or reveal to me, which would enable me to acquit Him of hardness or
injustice. I will not, though He slay me, say that I trust Him and love
Him when I do not. He may crush me with repeated blows of His hand, but
He has given me the divine power of judging, of testing, of balancing;
and I must use it even in His despite. He does not require, I think, a
dull and broken submissiveness, the submissiveness of the creature that
is ready to admit anything, if only he can be spared another blow. What
He requires, so my spiri