8
there. His ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts. How beautifully Dante says it in words which I had chanced, as we say, to read last Thursday morning:—
The power of vision that our world receives,
As eye into the ocean penetrates,
Which, though it sees the bottom near the shore,
Upon the deep perceives it not, and yet
'Tis there, but it is hidden by the depth.
''Tis there,' that is the point. Faith, but not blind faith. We know the habitation of His seat. At the centre of His ways and thoughts is in fullness and perfection inconceivable the power of that which we know as love. That is the witness of Christ and of the Cross, and from its very depths the faith of our conscience echoes to its truth. The power of the dark hours for those that love God is to make that truth more luminous by the very darkness. May it be so with many of you at this time. It will be so, I believe, in the lives which suffer most to-day, and to which we long so vainly to offer comfort. It is only a few years ago that some of us saw the quiet intrepidity with which she who has now gone from us faced the imminent prospect, as it then seemed, of a widowed life. A like example will, by God's grace, be set in this fiercer and longer trial. For to those that trust there springs up light in the darkness. He feeds them in the time of dearth. Let none of us,
