rolled by.  To attempt to speak upon that would have been vain, for I had nothing to say on the matter now.  And if I could have recalled my former thoughts, I should have felt a hypocrite as I delivered them, so utterly dissociated would they have been from anything that I was thinking or feeling now.  Here would have been my visible form and audible voice, uttering that as present to me now, as felt by me now, which I did think and feel yesterday, but which, although I believed it, was not present to my feeling or heart, and must wait the revolution of months, or it might be of years, before I should feel it again, before I should be able to exhort my people about it with the fervour of a present faith.  But, indeed, I could not even recall what I had thought and felt.  Should I then tell them that I could not speak to them that morning?—­There would be nothing wrong in that.  But I felt ashamed of yielding to personal trouble when the truths of God were all about me, although I could not feel them.  Might not some hungry soul go away without being satisfied, because I was faint and down-hearted?  I confess I had a desire likewise to avoid giving rise to speculation and talk about myself, a desire which, although not wrong, could neither have strengthened me to speak the truth, nor have justified me in making the attempt.—­What was to be done?

All at once the remembrance crossed my mind of a sermon I had preached before upon the words of St Paul:  “Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?” a subject suggested by the fact that on the preceding Sunday I had especially felt, in preaching to my people, that I was exhorting myself whose necessity was greater than theirs—­at least I felt it to be greater than I could know theirs to be.  And now the converse of the thought came to me, and I said to myself, “Might I not try the other way now, and preach to myself?  In teaching myself, might I not teach others?  Would it not hold?  I am very troubled and faithless now.  If I knew that God was going to lay the full weight of this grief upon me, yet if I loved Him with all my heart, should I not at least be more quiet?  There would not be a storm within me then, as if the Father had descended from the throne of the heavens, and ’chaos were come again.’  Let me expostulate with myself in my heart, and the words of my expostulation will not be the less true with my people.”

All this passed through my mind as I sat in my study after breakfast, with the great old cedar roaring before my window.  It was within an hour of church-time.  I took my Bible, read and thought, got even some comfort already, and found myself in my vestry not quite unwilling to read the prayers and speak to my people.