s, fond of
exhibiting power, revengeful, cruel, that does us harm. We must rather
think of His Heart as full of courage, energy, and hope; as teeming
with joy, lightness, zest, mirth; and then we can begin to think of
failures, fears, delays as things small and unimportant, not as
malicious ambushes, but as rough bits of road, as obstacles to reveal
and to develop our strength and gaiety. There is no joy in the world so
great as the joy of finding ourselves stronger than we know; and that
is what God is bent upon showing us, and not upon proving to us that we
are vile and base, in the spirit of the old Calvinist who said to his
own daughter when she was dying of a painful disease, that she must
remember that all short of Hell was mercy. It is so; but Hell is rather
what we start from, and out of which we have to find our way, than the
waste-paper basket of life, the last receptacle for our shattered
purposes.

XX

SERENITY

To achieve serenity we must have the power of keeping our hearts and
minds fixed upon something which is beyond and above the passing
incidents of life, which so disconcert and overshadow us, and which are
after all but as clouds in the sky, or islets in a great ocean. Think
with what smiling indifference a man would meet indignation and abuse
and menace, if he were aware that an hour hence he would be
triumphantly vindicated and applauded. How calmly would a man sleep in
a condemned cell if he knew that a free pardon were on its way to him!
Of course the more eagerly and enjoyably we live, so much the more we
are affected by little incidents, beyond which we can hardly look when
they bring us so much pleasure or so much discomfort; and thus it is
always the men and women of keen and highly-strung natures, who taste
the quality of every moment, in its sweetness and its bitterness, who
will most feel the influence of fear. Edward FitzGerald once sadly
confessed that, as life went on, days of perfect delight--a beautiful
scene, a melodious music, the society of those whom he loved
best--brought him less and less joy, because he felt that they were
passing swiftly, and could not be recalled. And of course the
imaginative nature which lives tremulously in delight will be most apt
to portend sadness in hours of happiness, and in sorrow to anticipate
the continuance of sorrow. That is an inevitable effect of temperament;
but we must not give way helplessly to temperament, or allow ourselves
to