receive it our soul sinks in shame. Instead of expanding our nature
and bringing us into a finished and satisfactory condition, and
setting our life in right relations with other men, we find the new
gift to be a curse to us, hampering us, cutting us off in unexpected
ways from our usefulness, thwarting and blighting our life round its
whole circumference.

For a man is never very long in discovering the mischief he has done
by setting his own wisdom above God's, by underrating God's goodness
and overriding God's will. When Samuel remonstrated with Israel and
warned them that their king would tyrannise over them, all the answer
he got was: "Nay, but we will have a king to rule over us." But, not
many days after, they came to Samuel with a very different petition:
"Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God, that we die not; for we
have added unto all our sins this evil, to ask us a king." So it is
always; we speedily recognise the difference between God's wisdom and
our own. What seemed neglect on His part is now seen to be care, and
what we murmured at as niggardliness and needless harshness we now
admire as tenderness. Those at least are our second and wiser
thoughts, even although at first we may be tempted with Manoah when
he saw his son blind and fettered in the Philistine dungeon, to
exclaim,

What thing good
Pray'd for, but often proves our woe, our bane?
I prayed for children and thought barrenness
In wedlock a reproach;
I gain'd a son And such a son
as all men hail'd me happy.
Who would be now a father in my stead?