Old words which he learnt at his mother’s knee come back to him—old words that he almost forgot, perhaps, in the strength and gaiety of his youth and prosperity. And he prays. He prays clumsily enough, perhaps. He is not accustomed to praying; and he hardly knows what to ask for, or how to ask for it. Be it so. In that he is not so very much worse off than others. What did St. Paul say, even of himself? ‘We know not how to ask for anything as we ought: but the Spirit maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered’—too deep for words. Yes, in every honest heart there are longings too deep for words. A man knows he wants something: but knows not what he wants. He cannot find the right words to say to God. Let him take comfort. What he does not know, the Holy Spirit of Whitsuntide—the Spirit of Jesus Christ—does know. Christ knows what we want, and offers our clumsy prayers up to our heavenly Father, not in the shape in which we put them, but as they ought to be, as we should like them to be; and our Father hears them. Yes. Our Father hears the man who cries to him, however clumsily, for light and strength to do his duty. So it is; so it has been always; so it will be to the end. And then as the man’s day, so his strength will be. He may be utterly puzzled, utterly down-hearted, utterly hopeless: but the day comes to him in which he is baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire. He begins to have a right judgment; to see clearly what he ought to do, and how to do it. He grows more shrewd, more prompt, more steady than he ever has been before. And there comes a fire into his heart, such as there never was before; a spirit and a determination which nothing can daunt or break, which makes him bold, cheerful, earnest, in the face of the anxiety and danger which would have, at any other time, broken his heart. The man is lifted up above himself, and carried on through his work, he hardly knows how, till he succeeds nobly, or if he fails, fails nobly; and be the end as it may, he gets the work done which God has given him to do. And then when he looks back, he is astonished at himself. He wonders how he could dare so much; wonders how he could endure so much; wonders how the right thought came into his head at the right moment. He hardly knows himself again. It seems to him, when he thinks over it all, like a grand and awful dream. And the world is astonished at him likewise. They cry, ‘Who would have thought there was so much in this man? who would have expected such things of him?’ And they call him a hero—and so he is. Yes, the world is right, more right than it thinks in both sayings. Who would have expected there was so much in the man? For there was not so much in him, till God put it there. And again they are right, too; more right than they think in calling that man a hero, or that woman a heroine. For what is the old meaning, the true meaning of a hero or a heroine?