Why, O Supreme Good, do You show Yourself to me as infinitely desirable, only to elude my grasp when I stretch out my hands to feel for You and draw You to myself? Why do You brush past me in the darkness to leave me all the more desolate and disconsolate because You were so near? Why are You deaf when I cry? Why, here in this tabernacle, are You so near and yet so far away? Why do You make it more and more impossible for me to find rest out of You, and then deny Yourself to my soul? Why have You sought for me so persistently when I fled from You, to hide from me now that I seek You? _My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?_ Is Your answer to me this--that I have forsaken You first? Is the hiding of Your Face the just punishment of wilful deafness to Your voice and resistance to Your leading? Are You waiting for some act of mine as the price of Your turning to me? Is it pride or any other passion that interposes as a cloud between us? What is it, my God? Take it away at any cost. I am sorry for my insincerity; for all meanness in my dealings with You; for all wilful blindness and deafness; for the cowardice that fears to see what will call for effort and for sacrifice. If conscience does not reproach me, I am not hereby justified, because Your all-seeing eye may note, does note what escapes mine. I own to whatever You see that is amiss. I am perfectly conscious that there is more--oh, a thousand times more than enough to make You turn away Your Face and forsake me utterly. Show me what You will have me see, that I may amend it, and bear with what You dare not show me, lest I should be utterly cast down and despair. _My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me!_ You have taught me by Your own meek complaint that I too may complain lovingly. I look up through the darkness of Calvary. I hear above me that cry from Your own lips, and I am instructed and comforted. If the well-beloved Son for bearing the appearance of sin was thus shut out from the Father’s Face, how shall a sinner complain? If this was done in the green wood, what shall be done in the dry? And if all through the blackness of that desolation He remained still the well-beloved Son, so may the weakest of His brethren, so may I remain--dear to the Father’s Heart through all the discipline of chastisement, through all the needful purification of my imperfect love. In the very midnight of His dereliction He called on the Father, clung to the Father, threw Himself on the Father with absolute trust. So may I, so _must_ I, in the darkness that is but the faintest shadow of His. _Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit_--for this trial, for every trial, for the last trial, when the shadow of death will close round me, and it will be hard to find Your Face. Into the hands that created me, that redeemed me, into which I shall pass at the moment of death, Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.