One day we try to tell some one. Then a grave head is shaken solemnly at us. We are wicked, very wicked, they say; we ought not to have such thoughts. God is good, very good. We are wicked, very wicked. That is the comfort we get. Wicked! Oh, Lord! do we not know it? Is it not the sense of our own exceeding wickedness that is drying up our young heart, filling it with sand, making all life a dust bin for us?

Wicked? We know it! Too vile to live, too vile to die, too vile to creep over this, God’s earth, and move among his believing men. Hell is the one place for him who hates his master, and there we do not want to go. This is the comfort we get from the old.

And once again we try to seek for comfort. This time great eyes look at us wondering, and lovely little lips say, —

“If it makes you so unhappy to think of these things, why do you not think of something else, and forget?”

Forget! We turn away and shrink into ourself. Forget and think of other things! Oh, God! do they not understand that the material world is but a film, through every pore of which God’s awful spirit-world is shining through on us? We keep as far from others as we can.

One night, a rare, clear moonlight night, we kneel in the window; every one else is asleep, but we kneel reading by the moonlight. It is a chapter in the prophets, telling how the chosen people of God shall be carried on the Gentiles’ shoulders. Surely the Devil might leave us alone; there is not much handle for him there. But presently he comes.

“Is it right there should be a chosen people? To Him, who is father to all, should not all be dear?”

How can we answer him? We were feeling so good till he came. We put our head down on the Bible and blister it with tears. Then we fold our hands over our head and pray, till our teeth grind together. Oh, that from that spirit-world, so real and yet so silent, that surrounds us, one word would come to guide us! We are left alone with this devil; and God does not whisper to us. Suddenly we seize the Bible, turning it round and round, and say hurriedly,

“It will be God’s voice speaking to us; his voice as though we heard it.”

We yearn for a token from the inexorably Silent One.

We turn the book, put our finger down on a page, and bend to read by the moonlight. It is God’s answer. We tremble.

“Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took Titus with me also.”