OF all the physical afflictions which come to human life, hopeless blindness, seizing on its victim in youth or in active middle age, seems in anticipation the most terrible. Even the agonizing forms of mortal disease, like cancer, are self-limited, and their very acuteness invokes all that sympathy and nursing can do for their alleviation. But the blind are soon left to settle down to the dreary round of semi-helplessness, and their imprisonment suggests sympathy only to the stranger. To their own little world it becomes a matter of course.
Yet, in spite of this appalling test of human endurance, the blind are distinguished for sweetness and lofty resignation. The finality of their doom doubtless contributes something to their courage. But when we get to the heart of their resignation, we generally find that out of their enforced darkness has sprung a communion with God more sustaining than that enjoyed by others. The gulf between the seen and the unseen narrows for them day by day. They learn to believe in friend, child, wife, husband, whom they can not see. Why not in God?
They live much within themselves, and think deeply of the things of the spirit. Soon they begin to reckon their blessings instead of their miseries. With that change comes peace.
Of those blessings there is none more often counted than a well-stored memory. An able New York lawyer spent weeks one summer among the White Mountains. He was much alone, and he had a new gravity of demeanor. One day a lady asked him if he were not taking a longer vacation than usual.
"Yes, I am," he replied, "My oculist tells me that in three months I shall be blind. I am spending the time in looking at the mountains, and in learning by heart the Psalms of David."
A strong, active woman was stricken with blindness when she was forty years old. For the first year the burden was almost greater than she could bear. Then the depression was slowly lifted, and she became the light and cheer of the household.
"There's one thing for which I can never be thankful enough," she said to a visitor. "I had made it a practise ever since I was a girl to read the Bible through every year. Just three years before I lost my eyesight it occurred to me that for a year or two I would give the time I had for the Bible to learning some of my favorite chapters by heart. So I memorized passage after passage, and they have been worth everything to me since I have been blind. Wasn't it a wonderful blessing that I should have had that thought? It seems to me I never appreciated my memory until I was blind, and I am sure I did not know what comfort there was in the Bible."—Youth's Companion.