“Auntie, I think I should like to be a painter.”

“Why?” returned his companion.

“Because, then,” answered the child, “I could help God to paint the sky.”

What his aunt replied I do not know; for they were presently beyond my hearing.  But I went on answering him myself all the way home.  Did God care to paint the sky of an evening, that a few of His children might see it, and get just a hope, just an aspiration, out of its passing green, and gold, and purple, and red? and should I think my day’s labour lost, if it wrought no visible salvation in the earth?

But was the child’s aspiration in vain?  Could I tell him God did not want his help to paint the sky?  True, he could mount no scaffold against the infinite of the glowing west.  But might he not with his little palette and brush, when the time came, show his brothers and sisters what he had seen there, and make them see it too?  Might he not thus come, after long trying, to help God to paint this glory of vapour and light inside the minds of His children?  Ah! if any man’s work is not with God, its results shall be burned, ruthlessly burned, because poor and bad.

“So, for my part,” I said to myself, as I walked home, “if I can put one touch of a rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman of my cure, I shall feel that I have worked with God.  He is in no haste; and if I do what I may in earnest, I need not mourn if I work no great work on the earth.  Let God make His sunsets:  I will mottle my little fading cloud.  To help the growth of a thought that struggles towards the light; to brush with gentle hand the earth-stain from the white of one snowdrop—­such be my ambition!  So shall I scale the rocks in front, not leave my name carved upon those behind me.”

People talk about special providences.  I believe in the providences, but not in the specialty.  I do not believe that God lets the thread of my affairs go for six days, and on the seventh evening takes it up for a moment.  The so-called special providences are no exception to the rule—­they are common to all men at all moments.  But it is a fact that God’s care is more evident in some instances of it than in others to the dim and often bewildered vision of humanity.  Upon such instances men seize and call them providences.  It is well that they can; but it would be gloriously better if they could believe that the whole matter is one grand providence.

I was one of such men at the time, and could not fail to see what I called a special providence in this, that on my first attempt to find where I stood in the scheme of Providence, and while I was discouraged with regard to the work before me, I should fall in with these two—­an old man whom I could help, and a child who could help me; the one opening an outlet for my labour and my love, and the other reminding me of the highest source of the most humbling comfort,—­that in all my work I might be a fellow-worker with God.