for
even the best of us always to keep our equanimity. But with the
consciousness of divine guidance, one sees many a thing in life quite
differently from what would otherwise be possible.

"All these are things that every human being KNOWS, who has had
experience of them; and of which the most speaking examples could be
brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom are unable to
attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of its own
accord."[317]

[317] C. Hilty: Gluck, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff.

Such accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is, not
that particular events are tempered more towardly to us by a
superintending providence, as a reward for our reliance, but that by
cultivating the continuous sense of our connection with the power that
made things as they are, we are tempered more towardly for their
reception. The outward face of nature need not alter, but the
expressions of meaning in it alter. It was dead and is alive again. It
is like the difference between looking on a person without love, or
upon the same person with love. In the latter case intercourse springs
into new vitality. So when one's affections keep in touch with the
divinity of the world's authorship, fear and egotism fall away; and in
the equanimity that follows, one finds in the hours, as they succeed
each other, a series of purely benignant opportunities. It is as if
all doors were opened, and all paths freshly smoothed. We meet a new
world when we meet the old world in the spirit which this kind of
prayer infuses.

Such a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.[318] It is
that of mind-curers, of the transcendentalists, and of the so-called
"liberal" Christians. As an expression of it, I will quote a page from
one of Martineau's sermons:--

[318] "Good Heaven!" says Epictetus, "any one thing in the creation is
sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful mind.
The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from milk,
and wool from skins; who formed and planned it? Ought we not, whether
we dig or plough or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is God, who
has supplied us with these instruments to till the ground; great is
God, who has given us hands and instruments of digestion, who has given
us to grow insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These things we ought
forever to celebrate.... But because the most of you are blind and
insensib