My faith has been no holiday or Sunday faith, but one for every-day use; a faith to live and die in, not to argue or talk about. It has had to stand the wear and tear of life; it was not got in prosperity. It has had to carry me through years of anxious toil and small means, through the long sicknesses of those dearer to me than my own life, through deaths amongst them both sudden and lingering. Few men of my age have had more failures of all kinds; no man has deserved them more, by the commission of all kinds of blunders and errors, by evil tempers, and want of faith, hope, and love. Through all this it has carried me, and has risen up in me after every failure and every sorrow, fresher, clearer, stronger. Why do I say “_it_?” I mean He. He has carried me through it all; He who is your Head and the Head of every man, woman, child, on this earth, or who has ever been on it, just as much as he is my Head. And he will carry us all through every temptation, trial, sorrow, we can ever have to encounter, in this world or any other, if we will only turn to him, lay hold of him, and cast them all upon him, as he has bidden us. My younger brothers, you on whom the future of your country, under God, at this moment depends, will you not try him? Is he not worth a trial? CXXIII. Precious as his love was to him, and deeply as it affected his whole life, Tom felt that there must be something beyond it—that its full satisfaction would not be enough for him. The bed was too narrow for a man to stretch himself on. What he was in search of must underlie and embrace his human love, and support it. Beyond and above all private and personal desires and hopes and longings, he was conscious of a restless craving and feeling about after something which he could not grasp, and yet which was not avoiding him, which seemed to be mysteriously laying hold of him and surrounding him. The routine of chapels, and lectures, and reading for degree, boating, cricketing, Union-debating—all well enough in their way—left this vacuum unfilled. There was a great outer visible world, the problems and puzzles of which were rising before him and haunting him more and more; and a great inner and invisible world opening round him in awful depth. He seemed to be standing on the brink of each—now, shivering and helpless, feeling like an atom about to be whirled into the great flood and carried he knew not where—now, ready to plunge in and take his part, full of hope and belief that he was meant to buffet in the strength of a man with the seen and the unseen, and to be subdued by neither. CXXIV. Far on in the quiet night he laid the whole before the Lord and slept! Yes, my brother, even so: the old, old story; but start not at the phrase, though you may never have found its meaning.—He laid the whole before the Lord, in prayer, for his friend, for himself, for the whole world.