In few other circumstances can it have such an opportunity--can it rise
to equal height. It may be its final lesson, and deepest. God is in it
just in his seeming to be not in it--that we may choose him in the
darkness of the feeling, stretch out the hand to him when we cannot see
him, verify him in the vagueness of the dream, call to him in the
absence of impulse, obey him in the weakness of the will.
Even in her prayers Hester could not get near him. It seemed as if his
ear were turned away from her cry. She sank into a kind of lethargic
stupor. I think, in order to convey to us the spiritual help we need, it
is sometimes necessary--just as, according to the psalmist, "he giveth
to his beloved in their sleep"--to cast us into a sort of mental
quiescence, that the noise of the winds and waters of the questioning
intellect and roused feelings may not interfere with the impression the
master would make upon our beings. But Hester's lethargy lasted long,
and was not so removed. She rose from her knees in a kind of despair,
almost ready to think that either there was no God, or he would not hear
her. An inaccessible God was worse than no God at all! In either case
she would rather cease!
It had been dark for hours, but she had lighted no candle, and sat in
bodily as in spiritual darkness.
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