Christian fiction; Neighborhoods -- Scotland -- Fiction
"Not one, my darling. If anything is not his business, you not only
have not to do it, but you ought not to do it. Your words come from the
want of spiritual sight. We cannot see the truth in common things--the
will of God in little everyday affairs, and that is how they become so
irksome to us. Show a beautiful picture, one full of quiet imagination
and deep thought, to a common-minded man; he will pass it by with some
slight remark, thinking it very ordinary and commonplace. That is
because he is commonplace. Because our minds are so commonplace, have
so little of the divine imagination in them, therefore we do not
recognise the spiritual meaning and worth, we do not perceive the
beautiful will of God, in the things required of us, though they are
full of it. But if we do them we shall thus make acquaintance with
them, and come to see what is in them. The roughest kernel amongst them
has a tree of life in its heart."
"I wish he would tell me something to do," said Charlie. "Wouldn't I do
it!"
I made no reply, but waited for an opportunity which I was pretty sure
was at hand, while I carried the matter a little further.
"But look here, Wynnie; listen to this," I said, "'And he went down
with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them.' Was that
not doing his Father's business too? Was it not doing the business of
his Father in heaven to honour his father and his mother, though he
knew that his days would not be long in that land? Did not his whole
teaching, his whole doing, rest on the relation of the Son to the
Father and surely it was doing his Father's business then to obey his
parents--to serve them, to be subject to them. It is true that the
business God gives a man to do may be said to be the peculiar walk in
life into which he is led, but that is only as distinguishing it from
another man's peculiar business. God gives us all our business, and the
business which is common to humanity is more peculiarly God's business
than that which is one man's and not another's--because it lies nearer
the root, and is essential. It does not matter whether a man is a
farmer or a physician, but it greatly matters whether he is a good son,
a good husband, and so on. O my children!" I said, "if the world could
but be brought to believe--the world did I say?--if the best men in the
world could only see, as God sees it, that service is in itself the
noblest exercise of human powers, if they could see that God is the
hardest worker of all, and that his nobility are those who do the most
service, surely it would alter the whole aspect of the church. Menial
offices, for instance, would soon cease to be talked of with that
contempt which shows that there is no true recognition of the fact that
the same principle runs through the highest duty and the lowest--that
the lowest work which God gives a man to do must be in its nature
noble, as certainly noble as the highest. This would destroy
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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