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You may, says Bacon in his essay on Friendship, take sarza [sarsaparilla] to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flower of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend." And if no receipt so openeth the heart, no other so closes up a wound in it, or allays an aching in it. "Come to my heart, old comrade," exclaims Schiller's downcast hero, already sensibly lighter of heart at the mere sight of his tried associate

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THE

QUIETLY WAITING.

LAMENTATIONS iii. 26.

HE man that had seen affliction by the rod of Divine wrath, and whose lament it was that God had led him and brought him into darkness, but not into light,-hedging him about that he could not get free, and making his chain heavy, enclosing his ways with hewn stone, and making his paths crooked,-filling him with bitterness and making him drunken with wormwood,-removing his soul so far off from peace that he forgot prosperity and said, "My strength and my hope is perished from the Lord," remembering, though prosperity might be clean forgotten, remembering his affliction and his misery, the wormwood and the gall;-the man who had thus suffered could yet, and did, put on record the avowal, "It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord." Quietly to wait is often harder than hard work. The poet's incentive appeal to us to be "up and doing, with a heart for any fate," bids us, "still achieving,

still pursuing, learn to labour and to wait." The lesson to wait unlearnt, often the power to labour is lost, all heart for it is lost.

The one single evidence of strength in the early years of the Saviour, which is offered by F. W. Robertson in a sermon on "The Early Development of Jesus," is that calm, long waiting of thirty years before He began His work; during which time all the evils He was to redress were there, provoking indignation, crying for interference; and during all those years must His soul have burned within Him with a Divine zeal. "A mere man—a weak, emotional man of spasmodic feeling—a hot enthusiast, would have spoken out at once, and at once been crushed. The Everlasting Word Incarnate bided His own time-Mine hour is not yet come,' matured His energies, condensed them by repression; and then went forth to speak and do and suffer. His hour was come. This is strengththe power of a Divine silence, the strong will to keep force

1 As an American, this poet enforces upon his native land, in one of his prose works, the necessity of waiting, of every man patiently abiding his time-a lesson specially needful he asserts, in a country where the pulse of life beats with such feverish and impatient throbs, and where the national character wants the dignity of repose. He would have every man bide his time—“not in listless idleness,—not in useless pastime,—not in querulous dejection; but in constant, steady, cheerful endeavours, always willing and fulfilling, and accomplishing his task, that, when the occasion comes, he may be equal to the occasion."

Says Earl Stanhope of Pitt,-when, on the rejection of his India Bill in 1784, the young statesman was pressed by king and by colleagues to appeal to the people, but stood firm against both these solicitations and parliamentary attacks," He practised that hardest of all lessons to an eager mind in a hard-run contest-to wait.'

The error of the most ardent reformers, according to Mr. Buckle, has always been, that, in their eagerness to effect their purpose, they let the political movement outstrip the intellectual one, thus inverting the natural order, and defeating their design. "And this happens merely because men will not bide their time, but will insist on precipitating the march of affairs." A very different historian observes of Russia and its rulers that, although constantly actuated by the lust of conquest, they never precipitate the moment of attack; that, conscious of their strength, they await calmly the moment of action, and then act out their will. Austria's necessity was Italy's opportunity, said a reviewer of the events of 1860; and that necessity the Italian statesmen knew well must some day come to pass, if they could only induce the Italians to wait for it in patience.

till it is wanted, the power to wait God's time. 'He that believeth,' said the prophet, shall not make haste.""

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Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until it receive the early and latter rain. "Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts; for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh." "For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry." "My soul," said the psalmist, "truly waiteth still upon God, for of Him cometh my salvation"; and though offences abound, and not only the ways but the means of transgressors are hard, "Nevertheless, my soul, wait thou still upon God; for my hope is in Him." In the day predicted by the prophet when He shall swallow up death in victory, and wipe away tears from off all faces, in that day shall it be said, "Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us ; this is the Lord: we have waited for Him, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation." The apostle to the Hebrews admonished them that they had need of patience, that after they had done the will of God they might receive the promise: for yet a little while, and He that should come would come, and would not tarry. The psalmist again avows that he should utterly have fainted, but that he believed verily to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. But his next utterance is: "O tarry thou the Lord's leisure: be strong, and He shall comfort thine heart; and put thou thy trust in the Lord."

The Caxtonian essayist, treating of the alleged existence of an intellectual as well as a moral conscience, of both of which the content is serene and full in proportion as the attraction to things evanescent is counteracted by the attraction towards objects that endure, adds this remark: "Hence genius is patient as well as virtue, and patience is at once an anodyne and a tonic -nay, more, it is the only stimulant which always benefits and never harms." It has been observed of the processes and analogies of physical science (which alone claims, and within

its own limits legitimately claims, the possession of increasing certainty), that whether they can be transferred to the sphere of morals, and to the life of man, is at present a question perfectly open. "We must learn to wait; but undoubtedly this attitude of waiting, taken in conjunction with the influences of scientific study, exacts and inculcates mental habits [such as toleration and exactitude] of the greatest importance." Wait, is the counsel in the laureate's Love and Duty :

“... Wait, and Love himself will bring

The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit
Of wisdom. Wait: my faith is large in Time,
And that which shapes it to some perfect end."

So again, the same poet's wavering listener to the Two Voices sees and says that all the years invent; each month is various to present the world with some development.

"Were this not well, to bide mine hour,
Though watching from a ruined tower
How grows the day of human power ?"

Therefore,―

Blind Margaret's counsel to Mary Barton is equally emphatic and discreet, when-changing her tone from the somewhat hard way in which sensible people too often speak, to the soft accents of tenderness which come with such peculiar grace from them,—she tells her: "You must just wait and be patient. You may depend upon it, all will end well, and better than if you meddled in it now." "But it is so hard to be patient," Mary pleads. "Ay, dear," the other rejoins; "being patient is the hardest work we, any on us, have to do through life, I take it. Waiting is far more difficult than doing." Margaret has known that about her sight, and many a one, she adds, has known it

1 Sir Charles Lyell describes the founding of the Geological Society in 1807, as conducing greatly to the attainment of a then urgent desideratum, new data in large masses. "To multiply and record observations, and patiently to await the result at some future period, was the object proposed by them; and it was their favourite maxim that the time was not yet come for a general system of geology, but that all must be content for many years to be exclusively engaged in furnishing materials for future generalizations."--Lyell's Principles of Geology, p. 59.

in watching the sick; but it's one of God's lessons we all must learn, one way or another. Anon, Mary Barton comes across a harassed mother, pining for news of her son. No letters again! "I must just wait another day to hear frae my lad. It's very dree work, waiting," says Alice. And Margaret's words recur to Mary's mind. "Every one has their time and kind of waiting." A day comes when Mary Barton hovers, in a long illness, between life and death; and of the male friend most interested in her recovery we read, that now he found the difficulty which every one who has watched by a sick bed knows full well, and which is perhaps more insurmountable to men than it is to women: 66 the difficulty of being patient, and trying not to expect any visible change for long, long hours of sad monotony." The mind masculine is perhaps sexually typified in Will Belton,1 who hates waiting. It is noted, however, by the historian of Athens: its Rise and Fall, that men who become the leaders of the public less by the spur of passion than by previous study and conscious talent,-men whom thought and letters prepare for enterprise,-are rarely eager to advance themselves too soon. Making politics a science, he goes on to say of them, they are even fastidiously alive to the qualities and the experience demanded for great success; their very self esteem renders them seemingly modest : they rely upon time and upon occasion; and, pushed forward rather by circumstances than their own exertions, it is long before their ambition and their resources are fully developed. Thus, despite all his advantages, the rise of Pericles was slow. Plutarch significantly affirms of Brutus, that it is extremely probable he would have been the first man in Rome, could he have had patience awhile to be the second, and have waited till time had wasted the power of Cæsar and dimmed the lustre of his achievements.

1 "If you can be content to wait awhile, you will succeed," his sister tells him at a juncture of moment; "but when were you ever content to wait for anything?" "If there is anything I hate, it is waiting," is Will's reply.-The Belton Estate, chap. xxx.

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