1844-54. SPIRITUAL ALCHEMY. 371 



enough. This evil heart of unbelief will not quickly soften, and 

 the Saviour is not freely given the central place in it, and the 

 world looms deceitfully large in all my visions. 



" To do work for Him, in His spirit, is my increasing desire. 

 May my prayers be heard, and yours be doubled for me. I 

 know a serenity I have not known for months. How much of 

 it is the fruit of better health and less work, how much through 

 God's grace, I will not curiously inquire. They are all His, and 

 only His gifts. The whole household sends you the sincerest 

 wishes for a happy New Year. I seem to feel the pressure of 

 your great kind hand." 



After months of over-work and fatigue, he tells the same 

 friend in 1853 : "I can with a rejoicing heart say, that that 

 great and gracious Lord and Master whom we serve, grows day 

 by day dearer to me, and to do His will is to me increasingly 

 the desire of my heart, and its prayer." 



Writing to Dr. J. H. Gladstone in 1854, of a medical student 

 preparing for the mission field, he says, " He is in the way of a 

 training which will make him a powerful ambassador for Christ 

 among the subtle, sagacious, metaphysical, oriental nations. I 

 am going to give him charge of a class in summer, to secure for 

 him a thorough familiarity with our noble science. It is a 

 blessed thing to know that our Art, once called emphatically 

 ' the Black Art/ and which, when not held to be the offspring of 

 Satanic collusion, was looked to by the vulgar as fitted only to 

 gratify their lust for gold, can be made by us to serve the cause 

 of Christ. We shall be alchemists of another sort than the 

 older ones, and whisper to an unbelieving world that there sit- 

 teth beside the refining furnace, a great Master who can trans 

 mute the vilest human dross into gold seven times purified, and 

 died that He might procure for us the elixir of life, and secure 

 for His people a blessed immortality." 



It is never a desirable thing to detach religious acts or expres- 

 sions from their contemporaneous secularities and environments. 

 This has been strongly felt in illustrating George Wilson's inner 

 life, for never could there be a more charming union of playful- 

 ness and fun, with high-toned spirituality, than in very many of 

 his letters. They remind one of an air with many variations, 



