And, then, there is one other thing. What a strength prayer has been to
the grandest souls of the ages! Never was truer, finer truth written
than those magnificent words of Isaiah: "Even the youths shall faint
and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait
upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with
wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and
not faint!"
Take Jesus in his hour of agony, take Savonarola with his struggle,
take Huss, Wyclif, Luther, take all the grand souls of the ages when
they have simply stood with the feeling, One with God is a majority,
and ready to face the world, if need be, in the conviction that they
spoke for and represented the truth. The times of which Lowell speaks:
"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that
scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God
within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."
This sense that God is for the truth and right, and, if you are
standing for the truth and right, the Almighty Power is backing you up,
the ground you stand on impregnable, because of that position. You do
not expect God to work miracles, you do not expect him to do anything;
but simply the sense that you are in his presence, that you are on his
side, re- enforces you more than a thousand men could re-enforce an
army in the time of its need. This is the great sense of surety that
the poet Clough had in mind, when he wrote those wonderfully fine
words:
"It fortifies my soul to know That, though I perish, Truth is so; That
howsoe'er I stray or range, Whate'er I do, thou dost not change.
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