George MacDonald

-and thou shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins.-Matthewi. 21.I would help some to understand what Jesus came from the home of our Father to be to usand do for us. Everything in the world is more or less misunderstood at first: we have tolearn what it is, and come at length to see that it must be so, that it could not be otherwise.Then we know it; and we never know a thing really until we know it thus.I presume there is scarce a human being who, resolved to speak openly, would not confessto having something that plagued him, something from which he would gladly be free, something rendering it impossible for him, at the moment, to regard life as an altogethergood thing. Most men, I presume, imagine that, free of such and such things antagonistic, life would be an unmingled satisfaction, worthy of being prolonged indefinitely. The causesof their discomfort are of all kinds, and the degrees of it reach from simple uneasiness to amisery such as makes annihilation the highest hope of the sufferer who can persuadehimself of its possibility. Perhaps the greater part of the energy of this world's life goesforth in the endeavour to rid itself of discomfort. Some, to escape it, leave their naturalsurroundings behind them, and with strong and continuous effort keep rising in the socialscale, to discover at every new ascent fresh trouble, as they think, awaiting them, whereasin truth they have brought the trouble with them. Others, making haste to be rich, are slowto find out that the poverty of their souls, none the less that their purses are filling, will yetkeep them unhappy. Some court endless change, nor know that on themselves the changemust pass that will set them free. Others expand their souls with knowledge, only to findthat content will not dwell in the great house they have built. To number the varieties ofhuman endeavour to escape discomfort would be to enumerate all the modes of such life asdoes not know how to live. All seek the thing whose defect appears the cause of theirmisery, and is but the variable occasion of it, the cause of the shape it takes, not of themisery itself; for, when one apparent cause is removed, another at once succeeds. The realcause of his trouble is a something the man has not perhaps recognized as even existent; inany case he is not yet acquainted with its true natur

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