Resignation is too often conceived to be merely a submission not unattended with complaint to what we have no power to avoid. But it is less than the whole of a work of a Christian. Your full triumph as far as that particular occasion of duty is concerned will be to find that you not merely repress inward tendencies to murmur—but that you would not if you could alter what in any matter God has plainly willed.... Here is the great work of religion; here is the path through which sanctity is attained, the highest sanctity; and yet it is a path evidently to be traced in the course of our daily duties....
When we are thwarted in the exercise of some innocent, laudable, and almost sacred affection, as in the case, though its scale be small, out of which all of this has grown, Satan has us at an advantage, because when the obstacle occurs, we have a sentiment that the feeling baffled is a right one, and in indulging a rebellious temper we flatter ourselves that we are merely as it were indulgent on behalf, not of ourselves, but of a duty which we have been interrupted in performing. But our duties can take care of themselves when God calls us away from any of them.... To be able to relinquish a duty upon command shows a higher grace than to be able to give up a mere pleasure for a duty....
RESPONSIBILITY FOR GIFTS
The resignation thus described with all this power and deep feeling is, of course, in one form of thoughts and words, of symbol and synthesis, or another, the foundation of all the great systems of life. A summary of Mr. Gladstone's interpretation of it is perhaps found in a few words used by him of Blanco White, a heterodox writer whose strange spiritual fortunes painfully interested and perplexed him. 'He cherished,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'with whatever associations, the love of God, and maintained resignation to His will, even when it appears almost impossible to see how he could have had a dogmatic belief in the existence of a divine will at all. There was, in short [in Blanco White], a disposition to resist the tyranny of self; to recognise the rule of duty; to maintain the supremacy of the higher over the lower parts of our nature.'136 This very disposition might with truth no less assured have been assigned to the writer himself. These three bright crystal laws of life were to him like pointer stars guiding a traveller's eye to the celestial pole by which he steers.
When all has been said of a man's gifts, the critical question still stands over, how he regards his responsibility for using them. Once in a conversation with Mr. Gladstone, some fifty years from the epoch of this present chapter, we fell upon the topic of ambition. 'Well,' he said, 'I do not think that I can tax myself in my own life with ever having been much moved by ambition.' The remark so astonished me that, as he afterwards playfully reported to a friend, I almost jumped up from my chair. We soon shall reach a stage in his career when both remark and surprise may explain themselves. We shall see that if ambition means love of power or fame for the sake of glitter, decoration, external renown, or even dominion and authority on their own account—and all these are common passions enough in strong natures as well as weak—then his view of himself was just. I think he had none of it. Ambition in a better sense, the motion of a resolute and potent genius to use strength for the purposes of strength, to clear the path, dash obstacles aside, force good causes forward—such a quality as that is the very law of the being of a personality so vigorous, intrepid, confident, and capable as his.
FOOTNOTES:
112. Hawarden Grammar School, Sept. 19, 1877.
113. Mr. Gladstone on Lord Houghton's Life; Speaker, Nov. 29, 1890.
114. Gleanings, vii. p. 133.
115. Homeric Studies, vol. iii.
116. Book ii. § 89, 363.
117. Non enim solum acuenda nobis neque procudenda lingua est, sed onerandum complendumque pectus maximarum rerum et plurimarum suavitate, copia, varietate. Cicero, De Orat., iii. § 30.
118. The British Senate, by James Grant, vol. ii. pp. 88-92.
119. Anatomy of Parliament, November 1840. 'Contemporary Orators,' in Fraser's Magazine.
120. Lord Lansdowne to Senior (1855), in Mrs. Simpson's Many Memories, p. 226.
121. Malmesbury, Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, i. p. 155.
122. Life of Archbishop Benson, ii. p. 11.
123. The noble anti-slavery movement must be excepted, for it was very directly connected with evangelicalism.
124. Paruta, i. p. 64.
125. 'Blest statesman he, whose mind's unselfish will' (1838).—Knight's Wordsworth, viii. p. 101.
126. The first chapter in Sir Henry Taylor's Notes from Life (1847).
127. Marcus Aurelius, ix. p. 29.
128. Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Butler. 'My four "doctors,"' he tells Manning, 'are doctors to the speculative man; would they were such to the practical too!'
129. See below, p. 323.
130. Glanville's Vanity of Dogmatising.
131. See Shaftesbury's Life, iii. p. 495. He refused to be on a committee for a memorial to Thirlwall. (1875.)
132. First Sermon, Upon Compassion.
133. Gleanings, vii. p. 100, 1868.
134. Rosamund Gray, chap. xi.
135. Mr. Gladstone's rendering of