The altar fire by A.C. Benson

Then the Christian teacher says: "God has given you a will, an independent will to act and choose; put it in unison with His will." Alas, I know not how much of my seeming liberty is His or mine. He seems to make me able to exert my will in some directions, able to make it effective; and yet in other matters, even though I see that a course is holy and beautiful, I have no power to follow it at all. I see men some more, some less hampered than myself. Some seem to have no desire for good, no dim perception of it. The outcast child, brought up cruelly and foully, with vile inheritances, he is not free, as I use the word; sometimes, by some inner purity and strength, he struggles upwards; most often he is engulfed; yet it is all a free gift, to me much, to another little, to some nothing at all. With all my heart do I wish my will to be in harmony with His. I yield it up utterly to Him. I have no strength or force, and He withholds them from me.

I do not blame, I only ask to understand; He has given me understanding, and has put in my heart a high dream of justice and love; why will He not show me that He satisfies the dream? I say with the old Psalmist, "Lo, I come," but He comes not forth to meet me; He does not even seem to discern me when I am yet a long way off, as the father in the parable discerned his erring son.