Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. OF DIVINE DISCONTENT Sfe WHEREAS material discontent goes to the forwarding of common ambitions, having for success an ideal which is the mark of a passive spiritual condition—mere contentment—the discontent which is divine may well be the name of that critical attitude of the soul towards mortal circumstance and the changes which life effects in the fibre of man's consciousness. It also encloses the selective- ness of a delicately tempered sensibility within its meaning, and gives the thought a wistful entanglement with origins, a plain hint of God actively implanted in the flesh. The strange gift of vision strips away the veils which hide the spiritual life from eyes which have not yet learned to see, and, as if from a great height, discerns the far horizon and the beckoning which allures and supports through all vicissitudes, and has in it the promise of theeternal. But divine discontent seeks no malign or insufficient comfort from mental false-dealing so acutely spoken of in the words: "They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace." The Bible is rich in the language of divine discontent, aiming its heavy blows at false optimism and at comfortings which are rooted in unfaith and pessimism. With many shifts, at many pains, the mind of man searches the recesses of experience for a span of rest which shall not turn into a battlefield. He ransacks the world for pleasure high enough to take from him the fever of his thought, hoping to throw off the inward impulse which pushes him on to more and ever more labour and weariness. Only the labour will reward him; but yet he often goes in fear of it, striving by every other means for ends which- elude him. I have heard one lament that beside the sea, the scale of...