withdrawn silence of condemnation,--into a crying out of her stones and a
shaking of her dust against us."

Must we not all admit, with Sir Henry Taylor, that "the retrospect of life
swarms with lost opportunities"? "Whoever enjoys not life," says Sir T.
Browne, "I count him but an apparition, though he wears about him the
visible affections of flesh."

St. Bernard, indeed, goes so far as to maintain that "nothing can work me
damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and
never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."

Some Heathen moralists also have taught very much the same lesson. "The
gods," says Marcus Aurelius, "have put all the means in man's power to
enable him not to fall into real evils. Now that which does not make a man
worse, how can it make his life worse?"

Epictetus takes the same line: "If a man is unhappy, remember that his
unhappiness is his own fault; for God has made all men to be happy." "I
am," he elsewhere says, "always content with that which happens; for I
think that what God chooses is better than what I choose." And again:
"Seek not that things should happen as you wish; but wish the things which
happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.... If
you wish for anything which belongs to another, you lose that which is
your own."

Few, however, if any, can I think go as far as St. Bernard. We cannot but
suffer from pain, sickness, and anxiety; from the loss, the unkindness,
the faults, even the coldness of those we love. How many a day has been
damped and darkened by an angry word!