ll pure enjoyment--but he had a heart-attack
the next day, and paid the penalty of his enjoyment. He could not climb
for some years after that." "Yes," I said, "I think that has been my
case--but my fear is that if I lose the habit--and I seem to have lost
it--I shall never be able to take it up again." "No, you need not fear
that," he replied; "if something is given you to say, you will be able
to say it, and say it better than ever--but no doubt you feel very much
lost without it. How do you fill the time?" "I hardly know," I said,
"not very profitably--I read, I teach my daughter, I muddle along."
"Well," he said, smiling, "the hours in which we muddle along are not
our worst hours. You believe in God?" The suddenness of this question
surprised me. "Yes," I said, "I believe in God. I cannot disbelieve.
Something has placed me where I am, something urges me along; there is
a will behind me, I am sure of that. But I do not know whether that
will is just or unjust, kind or unkind, benevolent or indifferent. I
have had much happiness and great prosperity, but I have had to bear
also things which are inconceivably repugnant to me, things which seem
almost satanically adapted to hurt and wound me in my tenderest and
innermost feelings, trials which seem to be concocted with an almost
infernal appropriateness, not things which I could hope to bear with
courage and faith, but things which I can only endure with rebellious
resistance." "Yes," he said, "I understand you perfectly; but does not
their very appropriateness, the satanical ingenuity of which you speak,
help you to feel that they are not fortuitous, but sent deliberately to
you yourself and to none other?" "Yes," I said, "I see that; but how
can I believe in the justice of a discipline which I could not inflict,
I will not say upon a dearly loved child, but upon the most relentless
and stubborn foe." "Ah," said he, "now I see your heart bare, the very
palpitating beat of the blood. Do you think you are alone in this? Let
me tell you my own story. Over fifty years ago I left Oxford with, I
really think I may say, almost everything before me--everything, that
is, which is open to an instinctively cheerful, temperate, capable,
active man--I was not rich, but I could afford to wait to earn money. I
was sociable and popular; I was endowed with an immense appetite for
variety of experience; I don't think that there was anything which
appeared to me to be uninteresting. But