ke the Magi,
they followed a star in the firmament with which they were familiar.
But, to their amazement, the star led them to the Saviour, and neither
of them ever regretted participating in so astonishing a quest.

'And thus,' as Oliver Cromwell finely says, 'to be a seeker is to be of
the best sect next to a finder, and such an one shall every faithful
humble seeker be at the end.' It always seems to me that the old
Puritan's lovely letter to his daughter, the letter from which I have
just quoted, is the gem of Carlyle's great volume. Bridget was
twenty-two at the time. 'Your sister,' her father tells her, 'is
exercised with some perplexed thoughts. She sees her own vanity and
carnal mind, and, bewailing it, she seeks after what will satisfy. And
thus to be a seeker is to be of the best sect next to a finder, and
such an one shall every faithful humble seeker be at the end. Happy
seeker; happy finder! Dear heart, press on! Let not husband, let not
anything, cool thy affections after Christ!'

With which strong, tender, fatherly words from an old soldier to his
young daughter we may very well take leave of the subject. 'Happy
seeker; happy finder! Dear heart, press on!' Oliver Cromwell knew
that there is no such thing as a fruitless search. If we do not come
upon our shining treasure in the exact form that our ignorance had
fancied, we discover it after a similitude that a much higher wisdom
has ordained. But the point is that we do find it. That was the
lesson that I learned as I peered into the abysmal darkness of the
mysterious old cupboard in my childhood, and the longer I live the more
certain I become of its truth.

VII

WITH THE WOLVES IN THE WILD

I

I like to think that Jesus spent forty nights of His wondrous life out
in the Wild with the wolves. 'He was with the wild beasts,' Mark tells
us, and the statement is not recorded for nothing. Night is the great
leveller. Desert and prairie are indistinguishable in the night.
Night folds everything in sable robes, and the loveliest landscape is
one with the dreariest prospect. North and South, East and West, are
all alike in the night. Here is the Wild of the West. 'A vast silence
reigned,' Jack London tells us. 'The land itself was a desolation,
lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was
not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter--the
masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eterni