To all of us there come times when we are out of heart with ourselves and with all that goes to make up our lives. Constant worry, endless toil, perpetual disappointments, seems then to be our lot; we feel ourselves unable to cope with the evil without and within, and our belief in the “Love which walketh in Mystery” becomes weak and faint.
We are, perchance, looking back to times when we dreamt how we too might
“Join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead, who live again
In minds made better by their presence, live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self;
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence, urge man’s search
To vaster issues.”
And our Ideals may seem dead and faded and beyond our reach. The following chapters will teach us, if even that be so, how we may “idealize or Real,” how our Drudgery may become our Blessing, how the Failures, the Burdens, the Temptations, which we are lamenting, may prove our best Friends on the upward way.
A magician’s wand is put in our hands, and if we will but consent to use it, we shall see everywhere about us in that lot which seemed so dark but a little ago, gems and treasures inestimable, which only wait to be ours by our use of them.
The ennobling influences of powers lying dormant, it may be, in our friendships; the strength, the endurance, the self sacrifice flowing form true love and tenderness and thought for others; the steadfast loyalty to all that is highest and holiest which is begotten by faithfulness to common duty; the peace of God passing all understanding, which garrisons the hearts and the lives of those who through life and death cling to the Truth as it is revealed to them by the Spirit of Christ; these are the angels shown to us as hovering about the path which once appeared to us so full of thorns.
We cannot read this book without feeling that such angels are not far from every one of our lives, however outwardly poor and small and narrow these may seem. And we must therefore rejoice that it is destined to exercise its ministry of high thought and helpful stimulus on this side of the Atlantic, as well as on that to which it owes its birth.
Ishbel Aberdeen
Bordighera
Ishbel Aberdeen – Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair (March 14 1857 -April 18 1939).
Her husband; Lord Aberdeen was Governor General of Canada from 1893 to 1898.
Bordighera is a town few miles from the French border on the Italian Riviera.