"
But on such occasions, as he came out of the abbey and went along the
streets, if he met the people hastening soiled and weary from their
daily toils, the joy would go out of his heart. He would begin to
think of the poor lives they were leading. And he would cry within
himself, "Oh that the lot of these toiling crowds had fallen on that
happy Age! It would have been easy then to be good. Goodness was in
the very air blessed by His presence. The people had but to see Him to
be glad." And sometimes his sorrow would be for himself. Sometimes,
remembering his own struggles to be good, and the difficulties in his
way, and how far he was from being as good as he ought to be, he would
say, "Would that I myself had been living when Jesus was on the earth."
More or less this wish was always in his heart. It had been in his
heart from his earliest years. Indeed, it is just a speech of his,
made when he was a little boy, which has been turned into the hymn we
so often sing:--
"I think when I read that sweet story of old,
When Jesus was here among men,
How He called little children, as lambs, to His fold,
I should like to have been with Him then.
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