Christian life -- Fiction; Conduct of life -- Fiction
"How I thank you," she said softly, "for what you have said. You have
interpreted life to me! You have given me a new conception of my God
and Saviour!"
Miss Clifford seemed quenched and humbled by these words; her
enthusiasm faded away and she looked at Helen with a deprecatory air
as she replied:
"Don't say that! I never felt so unfit for anything but to sit at the
feet of Christ's disciples and learn of them."
Yet I, so many years one of those disciples, been sitting at her
feet, and had learned of her. Never had I so realized the magnitude
of the work to be done in this world, nor the power and goodness of
Him who has undertaken to do it all. I was glad to be alone, to walk
my room singing praises to Him for every instance in which, as my
Physician, He had "disappointed my hope and defeated my joys" and
given me to drink of the cup of sorrow and bereavement.
MAY 24.-I read to Ernest the extract from Fenelon which has made such
an impression on me.
"Every business man, in short every man leading an active life,
ought to read that," he said. "We should have a new order of things
as the result. Instead of fancying that our ordinary daily work was
one thing and our religion quite another thing, we should transmute
our drudgery into acts of worship. Instead of going to
prayer-meetings to get into a 'good frame' we should live in a good
frame from morning till night, from night till morning, and prayer
and praise would be only another form for expressing the love and
faith and obedience we had been exercising amid the pressure of
business."
"I only wish I had understood this years ago," I said. "I have made
prayer too much of a luxury, and have often inwardly chafed and
fretted when the care of my children, at times, made it utterly
impossible to leave them for private devotion-when they have been
sick, for instance, or in other like emergencies. I reasoned this
way: 'Here is a special demand on my patience, and I am naturally
impatient. I must have time to go away and entreat the Lord to equip
me for this conflict.' But I see now that the simple act of cheerful
acceptance of the duty imposed and the solace and support withdrawn
would have united me more fully to Christ than the highest enjoyment
of His presence in prayer could."
"Yes, every act of obedience is an act of worship," he said.
"But why don't we learn that sooner? Why do we waste our lives before
we learn how to live?"
"I am not sure," he returned, "that we do not learn as fast as we are
willing to learn. God does not force instruction upon us, but when we
say, as Luther did, 'More light, Lord, more light,'--the light
comes."
I questioned myself after he had gone as to whether this could be
true of me. Is there not in my heart some secret reluctance to know
the truth, lest that knowledge should call to a higher and holier
life than I have yet lived?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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