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Let us think of the presence of God as the school of a right judgment, of communion with God as the means of growth in that high grace whereby frail, erring men may come to view with some justice of insight the movements and controversies, the hopes and fears, the promises and opportunities and dangers of tim age in which they have to play their part.

I. HOW RARE A THING IS ANY HIGH DEGREE OF THE FACULTY OF JUDGMENT. It may be, perhaps, more common than the very finest forms of literary or artistic excellence; but it is surely rarer than such a measure of genius as suffices to secure a recognized place among the poets or painters of a generation. There are more men whose works one can praise than there are whose judgment one can trust. There are many, indeed, whose decision on any point within the sphere of their especial business or study we, from outside that sphere, may gratefully accept as not likely to be bettered for some while. And even in regard to the conduct of life, in the sphere of judgment, there are many whose counsel it would be impossible to set aside without uneasiness or distress, many whom we must feel to be incomparably wiser judges than ourselves, many who will always enable us to see, more justly than by ourselves we could see, some aspect of a case. But there are very, very few from whom we get that higher, deeper, broader help which it is the prerogative of true excellence in judgment to bestow; help to discern, through the haste and insistence of the present, what is its real meaning and its just demand; help to give due weight to what is reasonable, however unreasonably it may be stated or defended; help to reverence alike the sacredness of a great cause and the sacredness of each individual life, to adjust the claims of general rules and special equity; help to carry with one conscientiously, on the journey towards decision, all the various thoughts that ought to tell upon the issue; help to keep consistency from hardening to obstinacy, and common sense from sinking into time-serving; help to think out one's duty as in a still, pure air, sensitive to all true signs and voices of this world, and yet unshaken by its storms. Yes, it is rare indeed, such help, and one's whole heart goes up to God in thanks and praise for those with whom one finds it; and it is as they are taken from one that something like the chill of autumn falls on life, and the real severity, the trial and strain of it, is felt, in deepening loneliness and silent fears.

II. It hardly can seem strange that excellence in judgment is thus rare if we go on to think of THE MANIFOLD DISCIPLINE THAT IT NEEDS.

1. Even physical conditions tend at least to tell on it, and most of us may have to own that there are days on which we know that we had better distrust the view we take of things. It is good counsel that a man should, if he has the chance, reconsider after his holiday any important decision that he was inclined to make just before it; that he should appeal from his tired to his refreshed self; and men need to deal strictly with the body and to bring it into subjection, not only lest its appetites grow riotous, but also lest it trouble with moods and miseries of its own the exercise of judgment.

2. There must also be the insight and resourcefulness of learning; that power to recognize and weigh and measure and forecast, which comes of long watching how things move; the power that grows by constant thoughtfulness, in study or in life; the distinctive ability of those who, in Hooker's phrase, are "diligent observers of circumstances, the loose regard whereof is the nurse of vulgar folly." It is a high prerogative of the real student of history, that power to summon from the past the very scenes and issues, achievements and disasters, unverified alarms and swift reversals, which may point to the real import of the present and correct its misplaced emphasis.

3. And then, beyond all physical and intellectual conditions, are the moral qualities and habits, without which even able men blunder so strangely. For round the seat of judgment there are specious counsellors, who read our perverse desires before we own them to ourselves, who know exactly the rate of swerving from justice which will suit and gratify without shocking us, whose Suggestions really seem reasonable enough, till, as it were, the search-light of an honest contrite heart is turned full upon them. No knowledge of the world will guard right judgment in a man who lets ill-temper have its way with him; no warnings from history or experience will pierce the smoky fog of wilful sullenness; no fineness of discernment will be proof against the steady pressure or the sudden onsets of ambition, And what shall we say of vanity as an assessor in the work of judgment? Surely, brethren, many of us might describe, with the help of humiliating recollections about our own folly, some stages of defective sight which are like milder forms of that blindness, that loss of all sense of humour and fitness and proportion, which belongs to a well-settled satisfaction with oneself.

4. But there is another disclosure that he needs, if in the multitude of sorrows, in the cloudy and dark day, in the terror by night, he is still to hold the course to which God calls him. Only by a light that is not of this world can we surely see our way about this world; only in the strength of thoughts that are not as our thoughts can we "think and do always such things as be rightful." In God's light do we see light; and for all our discipline and care we shall lose our way if we try to find or keep it in forgetfulness of Him and of His self-revealing. Sooner or later it will come home to us, by His mercy, that we must strive to bring our souls into His presence and to hold them there, if we would hope to "see life steadily and see it whole." We too may set our minds, as the psalmist set his, to think out and understand the hard things that the experience of life presents to us; we may perhaps fancy that we do understand them, and we may even deal with them successfully for a while; but presently we too shall find that they are proving too hard for us, until we go into the sanctuary of God. For it is there, in the most adequate consciousness of His presence that, in the power of the Holy Ghost, our weak and sinful souls can reach; it is there that the faculty of judgment gradually gains its freedom, its illumination, and its strength. It is not only that those who seek with contrite hearts that awful, holy Light must needs have striven to put away the sins that darken and bewilder counsel. It is far more than this. It is that in the stillness and simplicity of drawing near to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, and in the passiveness and intense listening of the soul, conscience may speak to us with penetrating clearness of the height, the majesty, the tranquillity of justice; of its home, in the very nature of God; of its work, sure as His will; of its exactness, absolute as His perfection; of the silent and immediate certainty with which the false estimates and verdicts of mankind are set right before "the Judge of all the earth"; of the solemnity of that appeal which, spoken or unspoken, reaches Him from every age, and is written down and cannot be erased: "O our God, wilt Thou not judge them?" "The Lord look upon it, and require it; Thou art the helper of the friendless;" "Thou art set in the throne that judgest right;" and of our heavy responsibility for every exercise of the power given us from above, to judge and act in whatsoever sphere, as His vicegerents among men. And then, as conscience thus speaks out her witness to the supreme and everlasting royalty of justice, the soul is also strengthened in the presence of God by a deeper sense of the power that is on the side of justice — the power that can wait, but not fail; that may use this means or that, but all for one unalterable end; the power which is behind the patience of Almighty God, and which we forget when we grow restless and fretful at His tarrying, and misread the little fragment that we see of His vast purpose in the world. But, above all, more moving to our hearts, more responsive to our need, than any thought which we can grasp of His power and His justice — there comes to us, as we watch and pray in the sanctuary of His presence, the distinctive disclosure of the faith of Jesus Christ. Much may still be dark and strange to us, and the questions that are always rising round us will need our utmost care, and we may often make mistakes in thought, and word, and deed; but the real, inner bewilderment, the fatal blundering of the soul can hardly be when we think of men and deal with them as, one by one, the distinct and unforgotten objects of that love which we ourselves have known in its astounding forbearance and condescension and inventiveness and glory. There is some sure light in the perplexity of this world, some hope even in its worst disasters, something steadfast through its storms, something still undefeated by its sins; since it is the scene where God, whose love can only be measured by the Cross, is seeking, one by one, in countless, hidden ways, the souls of men, if here He may but begin to draw them ever so little towards Himself, that hereafter He may prepare them to be with Him where He is.

(Bishop Paget.)

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KJV: When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me;

WEB: When I tried to understand this, it was too painful for me;