X.

The Messengers of Change.

PSALM IV. 19.

"Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God."

To one who tries everything by the standard of enjoyment, there arises a curious contradiction between the inner nature and the outer lot of men. We are thrown upon an existence where nothing is permanent, nothing asleep. We bring into it a soul that sighs for repose, that struggles with the restless tide, and ever hopes to drift into the still waters, and lie within the shelter of the hills. Our life is planted on the surface of a whirling sphere. Our prayer is to find its tranquil centre and revolve no more. Not that we are passive all the while, and borne along by powers wholly foreign to ourselves. Strange to say, we are sharers in the very stir and turmoil of which we complain. We create the race which we say outstrips us and leaves us faint. We fling our voice into the hum of human

history; yet stop our ears, lest it should drive us mad. It is not the mere lapsing seasons of the heavens and the earth, not the passage of our physical life alone, by which our remonstrance is called forth: but, not less, the vicissitudes of society, the shifting attitudes of thought and feeling, the evanescence of habits, institutions, and beliefs; processes, of which our own agency is the producing cause, and in pleading against which we are plaintiffs against our own will. Thus, we are at variance with ourselves, as much as with our God; and are like wayward children, breaking their toys and then weeping at the wreck which their own passion has made. The yearning for rest is no doubt deeper and stronger with the old than with the young, with the conservative than with the reforming spirit. But it exists in all. The very desire for progress is for the sake of some fixed goal: the most burning aspiration hopes to sit and look forth at last from the cool and freshening height. The intensest action sustains itself on the thought that it may soon subside: it loves not the burden it is impelled to bear, but trusts ere long to lay it down. When the poet or the moralist touches on the transiency of all earthly things, and the perpetual succession of fresh relations, it is always with some sadness in the strain: as if he went forth to take a tender farewell of the old, rather than to swell the triumph of the new. And even the philosophy which has brought itself to think that the universe is but an

eddy of eternal change, an ocean composed, all through its depths, of crossing currents of phenomena, has usually taught the doctrine either with a sorrow in the voice, or in the metal tone of heartless arrogance. The decree of vicissitude manifestly presses heavily upon the soul and whether it be the outward condition of established comfort that crumbles beneath the feet; or the beliefs of earlier days that change like the morning clouds before the kindling light; or the affections that have given a quiet sanctity to life, and are now called to drop their objects one by one at the word of Death h; the cry of the heart is still the same, "O that it were with me now, as it was in the times never to return!"

This regretful glance at the fading colours of the past, this longing to find rest from the ceaseless flow of change, has two different meanings and tendencies: one false and evil; the other true and good. Its impulse is false, when it leads us to the mere negative resource of ease and exemption, instead of the positive repose in God; when we only cry to be let alone, that our sleep be not disturbed too soon; when we simply shrink from the touch of new duties and new sorrows; when we are angry at the noble passion that urges us to toil and danger, and repent of the love that brings us grief. Its impulse is true, when it makes us, in our quest of peace, go out beyond vicissitude, instead of weaving a nest within it; when it refers us to a centre

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of stability, a spirit of Almighty constancy, a presence of pure and infinite affection, amid and behind the fluctuations of created things; when, instead of returning to our ark at the first spray of the cold flood, we do but rise upon the wing to look through the upper air, and then take our resolute track to the fixed and illumined hills. The soul is faithless which, when it is stung by severities and bowed by afflictions, tries to choke its sympathies and bring a frost upon its mellow seasons. It is not by reducing life to less, but by expanding it to more; not by muffling its stern tones, but by ringing its sweetness clearly out, that a serene harmony can be obtained. When duty is severe, we must be more reverently dutiful; if love brings sorrow, we must love more and better; when thought chills us with doubt and fear, we must think again with fuller soul and deeper trust.

The changeful lot which our lower instinct deprecates is, in truth, the very discipline by which God would draw us to himself. Repugnant to our animal and sentient nature, it kindles the diviner element to life. There is none but God himself that can abide for ever holy, for ever perfect, for ever wakeful, without any experience of alternation. As for us, if we have no changes, we fear him not. Our faculties of intellect and feeling, our sense of beauty and of right, the opening out of character and affection, are made dependent on the stimulus of incessant change. The

passiveness of the infant's existence is overcome by a thousand soliciting impressions; the light that fascinates the eye; the touch that puts a spring into the limbs; the ever-varying challenge of the mother's looks, forcing the tender cheek into a smile. The great apparatus of external nature, which would teach us nothing if it and we were fixed, glides with transitory images before the sight, and, ere we can sleep before one scene, presents us with another. This is indeed the very condition of all apprehension and intelligence. Dipped ever in the same scene, plunged in one colour, filled with one monotone, no perception would be startled into birth: the glance of attention sleeps, till the moment of transition; it leaps forth at the edges of light and darkness, of sound and silence, and in crossing the line first learns the realm on either side. So long as life is young, a perpetual stream of wonder pours on the mind and bathes it with exhaustless admirations: even were no lines of unexpected order, no new regions of knowledge opened, the rapid ripening of the faculties themselves would alter the apparent lights on every scene, and dissolve the outlines of each prior experience. And in this training of constant change there is a marvellous tendency to drive us upon faith in the Unchangeable. Finite things can be discerned only against the background of the Infinite. The visible body that glides before the eye is as an island in the Space that has no bounding