When once a man has risen to the vision of so splendid a purpose in so
great a world, he rejoices in the outlook. Granted that now he sees in
a mirror darkly, that many a cruel event in human life perplexes
still--he has seen enough to give solid standing to his faith. What if
an insect, someone has suggested, were born just after a thunderstorm
began and died just before it stopped--how dark would be its picture
of creation! But we who span a longer period of time, are not so
obsessed by thunderstorms, although we may not like them. They have
their place and serve their purpose; we see them in a broader
perspective than an insect knows and on sultry days we even crave
their coming. A broken doll is to a child a cruel tragedy, but to the
father watching the child's struggle to accept the accident, to make
the best of it and to come off conqueror, the event is not utterly
undesirable. He is not glad at the child's suffering, but with his
horizons he sees in it factors which she does not see. So God's
horizons infinitely overpass our narrow outlooks. There is something
more than whimsy in the theologian's saying, which President King
reports, that an insect crawling up a column of the Parthenon, with
difficulty and pain negotiating passage about a pore in the stone, is
as well qualified to judge of the architecture of the Parthenon, as we
of the infinitude of God's plans. Seeing as much as we have seen of
sense and purpose in the structure of creation, we have seen all that
our finite minds with small horizons could have hoped. We have gained
ample justification for the attitude toward suffering which Dolly
Winthrop in Silas Marner has immortalized: "Eh, there's trouble i'
this world, and there's things as we can niver make out the rights on.
And all as we've got to do is to trusten, Master Marner--to do the
right thing as far as we know and to trusten. For if us, as knows so
little, can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure as there's a
good and a rights bigger nor what we can know--I feel it i' my own
inside as it must be so."
VII
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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