May 6

Monday in Passion Week

For I called him alone, and blessed him. Isaiah 51:2.

FROM the dawning of conversion to the hour of death it is in solitude mostly that God speaks to the soul. Search the Scriptures, says a holy man, and we shall find that scarce ever, or never, did God speak in a multitude; so often as He would have anything known to men, he showed Himself, either to single persons or very few, and those severed from the common throng of men, either in the silence of the night, in the fields, or in deserts. When Jacob fled from Esau, then lonely, with his pilgrim staff, he saw the ladder which reached to heaven, Angels ascending and descending, and was himself the image of Him upon Whom they descended, and as he passed the night alone, the Angel, in whom God was, found him, and by his strength he had power with God; his strength was his faith and tears, wherewith he wept and made supplication unto Him. Why speak of man? Was not our Lord forty days alone with the wild beasts, in fasting and prayer, tempted by Satan, at once to teach us that in solitude also Satan tempts, and yet that loneliness is the presence of God, the means of victory?

All unseen the Master walketh

By the toiling servant's side;

Comfortable words He speaketh,

While His Hands uphold and guide.

Grief, nor pain, nor any sorrow

Bends thy heart, to Him unknown;

He to-day, and He to-morrow,

Grace sufficient gives His own.

Holy strivings nerve and strengthen,

Long endurance wins the crown;

When the evening shadows lengthen

Thou shalt lay thy burden down.