"It is as high as heaven;
what canst thou do?--deeper than hell; what canst thou know?"
There is an astringent relish about the truth of this conviction
which some men can feel, and which for them is as near an
approach as can be made to the feeling of religious joy.
"In Job," says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark
Rutherford, "God reminds us that man is not the measure of his
creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory
which the intellect of man can grasp. It is TRANSCENDENT
everywhere. This is the burden of every verse, and is the secret
if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there
is nothing more. . . . God is great, we know not his ways. He
takes from us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in
patience, we MAY pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in
sunlight again. We may or we may not! . . . What more have we to
say now than God said from the whirlwind over two thousand five
hundred years ago?"[29]
[29] Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198.
If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find
that deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be
altogether overcome and the danger forgotten.
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