A thought comes to me to-day which gives me great comfort. This is that, while the transitory incidentals of our life, important for the moment, pass out of it, the steadfast divine life which is in our earthly experience, perseveres, and can never die nor diminish. I feel content that much of me should die. I interpret for myself Christ's parable of the tares sown in the wheat field. As regards the individual, these tares are our personal and selfish traits and limitations. We must restrain and often resist them, but we cannot and must not seek to eradicate them, for they are important agents not only in preserving, but also in energizing our bodily life. Yet they are, compared with our higher life, as the tares compared with the wheat, and we must be well content to feel that, when the death harvest comes, these tares will fall from us and perish, while the wheat will be gathered into the granary of God. I do not desire ecstatic, disembodied sainthood, because I do not wish to abdicate any one of the attributes of my humanity. I cherish even the infirmities that bind me to my kind. I would be human, and American, and a woman. Paul of Tarsus had one or two ecstasies, but I feel sure that he lived in his humanity, strenuously and energetically. Indeed, the list he gives us of his trials and persecutions may show us how much he lived as a man among men, even though he did once cry out for deliverance from the body of
This text is part of:
[383]
with them, to give herself, as always, entirely and joyously.
Now and then she wrote down a meditation; here is one:--
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.