Wherein hast Thou loved us?--_Malach._ i. 2. My God, I may tell You anything and everything. All I have to tell interests You, more especially the difficulties and troubles which do not easily come out to others, and are not for the most part very helpfully met when they do come out. “For what man knoweth the things of a man, but the spirit of a man that is in him?”[113] But “the Spirit (of God) searcheth all things.”[114] You know me through and through, and I am only owning to what You see and understand perfectly when I tell You of repinings aroused by gifts and opportunities bestowed on others, but denied to me. I find myself questioning, if not Your wisdom, at least Your love, in that I am less richly dowered than others with the happy temperament, the talents, the moral and social qualities that we reckon among the better gifts of life, that render life not a duty merely, nor a source of merit, but a continual joy. I do not see that “the lines are fallen unto me in goodly places”; rather I ask petulantly, “_Wherein hast Thou loved me?_” The source of such disquiet is selfishness. This is the dismal consolation I should get were I to confide my trouble to the most indulgent of friends. But have You no better comfort for me, my Creator and my Father? To whom shall I go in my pains if not to Him Whose “hands have made me and formed me”;[115] to my Father “that hath possessed me, and made me, and created me”;[116] Who says to me, “I will have mercy on thee more than a mother”?[117] There is no humbling avowal I may not trust to You, and trusting it be sure of sympathy. “Why hast Thou done so to us?” was the meek remonstrance of the most submissive of handmaids. “Wherein hast Thou loved us?” was said by the most cross-grained and thankless of peoples. And to both questioners You vouchsafed a reply. I too, then, may ask: Why, Father, hast Thou done so to me? In withholding what is good in itself, what would have made me happier, _Wherein hast Thou loved me?_