s been, or
that might have been, the strength of weary lives should be withdrawn
or sternly withheld, but we need not be afraid, if we have one generous
impulse for another, if we ever put aside a delight that may please or
attract us, for the sake of one who expects or would value any smallest
service--and there are few who cannot feel this--we need not then, I
say, doubt that the love which we desire, and which we have somehow
missed or lost, is there waiting for us, ours all the time, if we but
knew it.

And even if we miss the sweet influence of love in our lives, is there
any one who has not, in solitude and dreariness, looked back upon
the time when he was surrounded by love and opportunities of love, in
childhood or in youth, with a bitter regret that he did not make more of
it when it was so near to him, that he was so blind and selfish, that he
was not a little more tender, a little more kind? I will speak frankly
for myself and say that the memories which hurt me most, when I stumble
upon them, are those of the small occasions when I showed myself
perverse and hard; when eyes, long since closed, looked at me with
a pathetic expectancy; when I warded off the loving impulse by some
jealous sense of my own rights, some peevish anger at a fancied
injustice; when I stifled the smile and withheld the hand, and turned
away in silence, glad, in that poisonous moment, to feel that I could at
all events inflict that pain in base requital. One may know that it is
all forgiven, one may be sure that the misunderstanding has faded in the
light of the other dawn, but still the cold base shadow, the thought of
one's perverse cruelty, strikes a gloom upon the mind.

But with God, when one once begins to draw near to Him, one need have no
such poignant regrets or overshadowing memories; one may say to Him in
one's heart, as simply as a child, that He knows what one has been and
is, what one might have been and what one desires to be; and one may
cast oneself at His feet in the overwhelming hope that He will make of
oneself what He would have one to be.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, it is not the poor wretch himself,
whose miserable motive for returning is plainly indicated--that instead
of pining in cold and hunger he may be warmed and clothed--who is the
hero of the story; still less is it the hard and virtuous elder son. The
hero of the tale is the patient, tolerant, loving father, who had acted,
as a censorious cri