The idea of the purpose of God underlying every incident, however apparently trivial, was much in his thoughts just then.

“We often are taught how momentous every thing and every moment is, by the charging of some trivial incident with tremendous issues.  A man fires off his gun.  He has done so thousands of times already, and yet, like Mr. Jamieson, my neighbour, on this one January morning he kills his own son, converting in a single instant, by a trivial incident, the whole of the rest of his life from sweet into bitter, by the terrible punishment which falls upon ‘carelessness.’  God seems to be asking us to weigh the fact, that in a chain of events the tiniest link is every bit as important and necessary in its place as the largest.

“And so I begin to take more and more account of little things.  The very people we pass in the street once, it may be never to pass again, the stream of faces that flows past us in London—­has all that no real connection with our life, except to stir a faint and vague emotion about the size of life and our own infinitesimal share in it?  I think it must be something more.  Of course, one lets drop grain after grain of golden truth that God slips into our hands.  I keep feeling that if we could only truly yield ourselves up for a single instant, put ourselves utterly and wholly in God’s hands for a second, the meaning of the whole would flash upon us, and our lesson would be learnt.  I think perhaps that comes in death.  I remember the only time I took an anaesthetic (when the body really momentarily dies—­that is, the functions are temporarily suspended), the great sensation was, after a brief passage of storm and agony, the sense of serenity and repose upon a lesson learnt, a truth grasped, so remote and so connected with infinite ideas, that the coming back into life was like the waking after years of experience; a phantom emotion, I expect; but, like many phantoms, a very good copy of the real one.  That is what I expect dying to be like.

“I was going to say that I try not to let even little things—­things that are thrust in my way curiously and without apparent reason that is—­go uninterpreted.  Why should I, for instance, have been introduced by my clergyman to the friend who was staying with him this morning, when I met them in the lane? and why should he have come in to lunch, and talked dull and trivial talk till three o’clock, and interrupted all our plans?  There seems some design in it all; and yet one is so impotent to grasp what it can be.

“Yet I suppose no one has failed to notice several small coincidences in their lives, of what might almost be called a providential kind.

“I read in a book about Laennec’s method, without the vaguest idea of who Laennec was, or what his method was.  The next day, I see, in a chart in the village school-room, ’Laennec, inventor of the stethoscope;’ and, the day following, I find and read his biography in a volume that I happen to take up to pass five minutes.  And yet we say ‘by chance.’