Letter Three (23 April 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.
“Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.”
As quoted in Graded Selections for Memorizing : Adapted for Use at Home and in School (1880) by John Bradley Peaslee, p. 104
“Trust to God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.”
As quoted in The Way To Win : Showing How To Succeed In Life (1887) by John Thomas Dale, p. 89
Context: I record the conviction that in one way or another, special individual help is given to every creature to endure to the end. It has been my own experience, that always when suffering, whether mental or bodily, approached the point where further endurance appeared impossible, the pulse of it began to ebb and a lull ensued.
You are tender-hearted, and you want to be true, and are trying to be; learn these two things: Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand. Do not be in a hurry, but be diligent. Enter into the sublime patience of the Lord. Trust to God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet. When God's people are able and willing thus to labor and wait, remember that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day; the grand harvest of the ages shall come to its reaping, and the day shall broaden itself to a thousand years, and the thousand years shall show themselves as a perfect and finished day.
Letter Three (23 April 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 1, “The Law of Gravitation,” p. 34
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 269.
