The morning of a glorious day came in with saffron, gold, and crimson.  The color sobered, but the glory grew.  The fleeting dyes passed, but the azure sky, the white clouds, and the yellow fire remained.  The larks dropped down to their breakfast.  The kine had long been busy at theirs, for they had slept their short night in the midst of their food.  Every thing that could move was in motion, and what could not move was shining, and what could not shine was feeling warm.  But the pastor was tossing restless.  He had a troubled night.  The rent of his house fell due with the miserable pittance allowed him by the church; but the hard thing was not that he had to pay nearly the whole of the latter to meet the former, but that he must first take it.  The thought of that burned in his veins like poison.  But he had no choice.  To refuse it would be dishonest; it would be to spare or perhaps indulge his feelings at the expense of the guiltless.  He must not kill himself, he said, because he had insured his life, and the act would leave his daughter nearly destitute.  Yet how was the insurance longer to be paid?  It was hard, with all his faults, to be brought to this!  It was hard that he who all his life had been urging people to have faith, should have his own turned into a mockery.

Here heart and conscience together smote him.  Well might his faith be mocked, for what better was it than a mockery itself!  Where was this thing he called his faith?  Was he not cherishing, talking flat unbelief?—­as much as telling God he did not trust in Him?  Where was the faithlessness of which his faithlessness complained?  A phantom of its own!  Yea, let God be true and every man a liar!  Had the hour come, and not the money?  A fine faith it was that depended on the very presence of the help!—­that required for its existence that the supply should come before the need!—­a fine faith in truth, which still would follow in the rear of sight!—­But why then did God leave him thus without faith?  Why did not God make him able to trust?  He had prayed quite as much for faith as for money.  His conscience replied, “That is your part—­the thing you will not do.  If God put faith into your heart without your stirring up your heart to believe, the faith would be God’s and not yours.  It is true all is God’s; he made this you call me, and made it able to believe, and gave you Himself to believe in; and if after that He were to make you believe without you doing your utmost part, He would be making you down again into a sort of holy dog, not making you grow a man like Christ Jesus His Son”—­“But I have tried hard to trust in Him,” said the little self.—­“Yes, and then fainted and ceased,” said the great self, the conscience.

Thus it went on in the poor man’s soul.  Ever and anon he said to himself, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him,” and ever and anon his heart sickened afresh, and he said to himself, “I shall go down to the grave with shame, and my memorial will be debts unpaid, for the Lord hath forsaken me.”  All the night he had lain wrestling with fear and doubt:  fear was hard upon him, but doubt was much harder.  “If I could but trust,” he said, “I could endure any thing.”