involved in conflicts of wills than I was before, and that the words of
Amos are literally fulfilled to me, "that the plowman shall overtake the
reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed." I say it
without knocking on wood, and with no fear lest my "good luck" will be
withdrawn, that from that time to this I have had plenty of work which I
have accomplished happily, and have never lacked a market for my
modest wares.



X


From all of which I have drawn one main inference--the imperative
urgency of Trust.

I had hitherto thought of trust as a gritting of the teeth and a
stiffening of the nerves to believe and endure, no matter what
compulsion one put upon oneself. Gradually, in the light of the
experience sketched above, I came to see it as simply the knowledge that
the supreme command rules everything to everyone's advantage. The more
we can rest mentally, keep ourselves at peace, _be still and know that
it is God_,[10] the single and sole Director, the more our interests will
be safe. This, I take it, is the kind of trust for which the great
pioneers of truth plead so persistently in both the Old and New
Testaments.

[10] The Book of Psalms.

Trust, then, is not a force we wrest from ourselves against reason,