fill up the gaps, and ask himself bravely and frankly whether he can trace a wise and honest and beneficent design all through.  He may try to console himself by saying that the disasters of good people, after all, are the exceptions, and that, as a rule, courage and purity of heart are rewarded, while cowardice and filthiness are punished.  But what room is there for exceptions in a world governed by God Whom we must believe to be all-powerful, all-just, and all-loving?  It is the wilful sin of man, says the moralist, that has brought these hard things upon him.  But that is no answer, for the dark shadow lies as sombrely over irresponsible nature, which groans over undeserved suffering.  And then, to make the shadow darker still, we have all the same love of life, the same inalienable sense of our right to happiness, the same inheritance of love.  If we could but see that in the end pain and loss would be blest, there is nothing that we would not gladly bear.  Yet that sight, too, is denied us.

And yet we live and laugh and hope, and forget.  We take our fill of tranquil days and pleasant companies, though for some of us the thought that it is all passing, passing, even while we lean towards it smiling, touches the very sunlight with pain.  “How morbid, how self-tormenting!” says the prudent friend, if such thoughts escape us.  “Why not enjoy the delight and bear the pain?  That is life; we cannot alter it.”  But not on such terms, can I, for one, live.  To know, to have some assurance—­that is the one and only thing that matters at all.  For if I once believed that God were careless, or indifferent, or impotent, I would fly from life as an accursed thing; whereas I would give all the peace, and joy, and contentment, that may yet await me upon earth, and take up cheerfully the heaviest burden that could be devised of darkness and pain, if I could be sure of an after-life that will give us all the unclouded serenity, and strength, and love, for which we crave every moment.  Sometimes, in a time of strength and calm weather, when the sun is bright and the friend I love is with me, and the scent of the hyacinths blows from the wood, I have no doubt of the love and tenderness of God; and, again, when I wake in the dreadful dawn to the sharp horror of the thought that one I love is suffering and crying out in pain and drifting on to death, the beauty of the world, the familiar scene, is full of a hateful and atrocious insolence of grace and sweetness; and then I feel that we are all perhaps in the grip of some relentless and inscrutable law that has no care for our happiness or peace at all, and works blindly and furiously in the darkness, bespattering some with woe and others with joy.  Those are the blackest and most horrible moments of life; and yet even so we live on.