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When He says to us, 'Go! we must go. When He says to us 'Do this! we must do it, though heart and flesh should shrink and fail. Unhesitating obedience to His authoritative command will deliver us from many of the miseries of self-will; and brave effort at Christ's side is as much the privilege as the duty of His servants and soldiers. II. So note, secondly, the Leader through death to life.
But circumstance impresses the hardest substance; and despite his native intellect and affected superiority over others, no one, perhaps, was more human, in his fitful moods, his weakness and his strength, his passion and his purpose, than that strange man, who had dared, in his dark studies and arrogant self-will, to aspire beyond humanity.
For, as St. Augustine says, man may live in two ways, either according to himself, or according to God; by self-will or by faith.
Accordingly having crossed over to Cercyra, where the navy was, he proposed to give up the command to Cicero, who was a consular, while he was only of prætorian rank; but when Cicero would not accept the command and set off for Italy, Cato observing that Pompeius through his stubborn self-will and unreasonable temper was desirous of punishing those who were sailing away, privately admonished and pacified him, by which Cato manifestly saved Cicero from death and secured the safety of the rest.
This is our hope, that his love is greater than our stupidity; that he will not tire of us, and our fancies, and our self-will, and our laziness, in spite of all our peevish tempers, and our mean and fruitless suspicions of his goodness. No! He will not tire of us, but will seek us, and save us when we go astray.
Our Sovereign has never set herself against the will of the people, expressed by its legitimate representatives, even when that will may have imposed upon her the sanction of changes which she did not approve. And that is much to say. We have seen young despots whose self-will has threatened to wreck a nation's prosperity.
"Poor Carrie will purchase wisdom dearly; depend upon it, the knowledge that she has brought on this illness through her own self-will will be the sharpest pang of all. You must go home and be a comfort to them all, as you have been our comfort," she added, sweetly; "and, Esther, I have been thinking over things, and you must trust Dot to me.
Modern psychologists would call Saul's case an instance of insanity brought about by indulgence in passion and self-will. Is there any reason why the deeper, more religious explanation should not be united with the scientific one? Does not God work in the working of 'natural' phenomena?
He knew that no woman could ever forgive the blunder he had made not a blunder of love but a blunder of self-will and an unmanly, unmannerly conceit. It had nearly wrecked her life: and he only realised it now, in the moment of clear-seeing which comes to every being once in a lifetime. Well, it was something to have seen the mistake at last. He had come to the sluice-gate.
It is a horrible and blasphemous perversion of Scripture, to take encouragement in sin, from those sad examples of it in the saints, which are held up, in terrorem, as so many beacons by which we may avoid the same. To talk, and especially to act like Self-will affords the fullest proof that a man never came in at the gate. What shall we say to these things? Lord, keep me!
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