me an inner voice, saying--"What matter
if _thou_ art confounded. _God is not_. Only believe firmly that God is
as good as thou with thy finite reason canst conceive; and He will make
thee at last able to conceive how good He is, and thou shalt have the
perfect blessing of seeing God." You will say I am inconsistent. So I
am; and so, if read honestly, are David's Psalms. Yet, that very
inconsistency is what brings them home to every human heart for ever. The
words of a man in real doubt and real darkness, crying for light, and not
crying in vain, as I trust I shall not.

. . . I only know that I know nothing, but hope that Christ, who is the
Son of Man, will tell me piecemeal, if I be patient and watchful, what I
am and what man is.

_Letters and Memories_.

Some things I see clearly, and hold with desperate clutch--a Father in
Heaven for all; a Son of God incarnate for all (that incarnation is the
one fact which is to me worth all, because it makes all others possible
and rational, and without it I should go mad); and a Spirit of the Father
and the Son, the fountain of all good on earth--who works to will and to
do of His own good pleasure--in whom? In every human being in whom there
is one spark of active good, the least desire to do right, or to be of
use. Beyond that I see little save that Right is divine and
all-conquering--Wrong utterly infernal, and yet weak, foolish, a mere
bullying phantom, which will flee at each brave blow, had we courage to
strike at it in God's name.

_Letters and Memories_.

There is not a sorrow which man can taste which Jesus Christ has not
fulfilled. He filled the cup of misery to the brim, and drained it to
the dregs. He tasted death for every man, and went down into the lowest
depths of terror and shame and agony and death, and, worst of all, into
the feeling that God had forsaken Him; that there was no help or hope for
Him in heaven, as well as earth; in a word, He went down into hell; even
into that lowest darkness where, for one moment, a man feels, that God is
nothing to him, and he is nothing to God. Even into that depth Jesus
condescended to go down for us. That worst of all temptations, of which
David only tasted a drop, when he cried out, "My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?"--Jesus drained to the very dregs for us. He went down
into hell for us, and conquered hell and death, and the darkness of the
unknown world, and rose again glorious from them, th