This being a common attitude of mind towards fancied blessings, how does God deal with it?  For a long time He may in compassion withhold the fatal gift.  He may in pity disregard our petulant clamour.  And He may in many ways bring home to our minds that the thing we crave is in several respects unsuitable.  We may become conscious under His discipline that without it we are less entangled with the world and with temptation; that we can live more holily and more freely as we are, and that to quench the desire we have would be to choose the better part.  God may make it plain to us that it is childish to look upon this one thing as the supreme and only good.  Providential obstacles are thrown in our way, difficulties amounting almost to impossibilities absolutely prevent us for a while from attaining our object, and give us time to collect ourselves and take thought.  And not only are we prevented from attaining this one object, but in other respects our life is enriched and gladdened, so that we might be expected to be content.  If we cannot have a king like other nations, we have the best of Judges in abundance.  And experience of this kind will convince the subject of it that a Providence shapes our ends, even although the lesson it teaches may remain unlearnt.

For man’s will is never forced:  and therefore if we continue to pin our happiness to this one object, and refuse to find satisfaction and fruit in life without it, God gives in anger what we have resolved to obtain.  He gives it in its bare earthly form, so that as soon as we receive it our soul sinks in shame.  Instead of expanding our nature and bringing us into a finished and satisfactory condition, and setting our life in right relations with other men, we find the new gift to be a curse to us, hampering us, cutting us off in unexpected ways from our usefulness, thwarting and blighting our life round its whole circumference.

For a man is never very long in discovering the mischief he has done by setting his own wisdom above God’s, by underrating God’s goodness and overriding God’s will.  When Samuel remonstrated with Israel and warned them that their king would tyrannise over them, all the answer he got was:  “Nay, but we will have a king to rule over us.”  But, not many days after, they came to Samuel with a very different petition:  “Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God, that we die not; for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to ask us a king.”  So it is always; we speedily recognise the difference between God’s wisdom and our own.  What seemed neglect on His part is now seen to be care, and what we murmured at as niggardliness and needless harshness we now admire as tenderness.  Those at least are our second and wiser thoughts, even although at first we may be tempted with Manoah when he saw his son blind and fettered in the Philistine dungeon, to exclaim,