To the same.
Your letter did not reach me until after I was at Port Hope, else I would have mentioned it then. I was glad to get it, and to see again the way in which the Lord was leading, though you had told me much the same when I was with you.
You speak of “Confidence.” To have confidence in ourselves would be a poor and worse than worthless thing, but we cannot place overmuch confidence in the Lord. Yet the heart shrinks from the path in which intuitively faith knows He will lead — a path in which there is no nourishment for the flesh — where we are to carry about in our bodies “the dying of Jesus.” And though confiding in His love, we may follow with trembling hearts. And yet, dear brother, we find when what we dreaded comes, what seemed like a dark and threatening cloud dissolves and scatters, leaving the sun shining as brightly as if the cloud had never been. I think Satan seeks to terrorize us in any stand we make for God, and would turn us aside from the path in which the Lord leads. He makes the difficulties loom up before, the soul as great mountains, while as a fact, when we reach them they are gone. I do not mean to say there are no difficulties: there are, to us, but there are none to God; and if we have Him with us they dissolve and pass away. But He sees it good for us to be tested, and to be cast in dependence on Him. After all, “one thing I do” is the great thing. One Object, a single eye, an obedient heart, and a captured heart, like that of Jonathan, who stripped himself for David; or better, Paul, who could say, “What things that were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ,” etc. Jonathan never gave himself fully to David, though he loved him as his own soul, but Paul gave himself fully to Christ. No kingly courts or royal links, kept him from full identification with a despised and rejected Christ, and His interests here below. Trials he had many, and infirmities, too, but all became but the occasion for the power of Christ to rest upon him, and through all he went “gladly.”
The Lord keep your heart in peace, dear brother, and that of your dear wife.
Affectionately your brother,