esired better things, I should assuredly have been
given them. I see, or seem to see, the same thing in the lives of many
that I know. What a man sows he shall reap! That is taken generally to
mean that if he sows pleasure, he shall reap disaster; but it has a
much truer and more terrible meaning than that--namely, that if a man
sows the seed of small, trivial, foolish joys, the grain that he
reaps is small, trivial, and foolish too. God is indeed in many ways
an indulgent Father, like the Father in the parable of the Prodigal
Son; and the best rebuke that He gives, if we have the wisdom to see
it, is that He so often does hand us, with a smile, the very thing we
have desired. And thus it is well to pray that He should put into our
minds good desires, and that we should use our wills to keep ourselves
from dwelling too much upon small and pitiful desires, for the fear is
that they will be abundantly gratified.

And thus when the time comes for recollection, it is a very wonderful
thing to look back over life, and see how eagerly gracious God has
been to us. He knows very well that we cannot learn the paltry value
of the things we desire, if they are withheld from us, but only if
they are granted to us; and thus we have no reason to doubt His
fatherly intention, because He does so much dispose life to please us.
And we need not take it for granted that He will lead us by harsh and
provocative discipline, though when He grants our desire, He sometimes
sends leanness withal into our soul. Yet one of the things that
strikes one most forcibly, as one grows older and learns something of
the secrets of other lives, is how lightly and serenely men and women
do often bear what might seem to be intolerable calamities. How
universal an experience it is to find that when the expected calamity
does come, it is an easier affair than we thought it, so that we say
under the blow, "Is that really all?" In that wonderful book, the
Diary of Sir Walter Scott, when his bankruptcy fell upon him, and all
the schemes and designs that he had been carrying out, with the joyful
zest of a child--his toy-castle, his feudal circle, his wide
estate--were suddenly suspended, he wrote with an almost amused
surprise that he found how little he really cared, and that the people
who spoke tenderly and sympathetically to him, as though he must be
reeling under the catastrophe, would themselves be amazed to find that
he found himself as cheerful and undaunt