Thy gentleness hath made me great." So sang David when God had delivered him out of the hand of all his enemies. Now men have not universally regarded God as gentle, and rarely have they believed that greatness is the natural outcome of that quality. And yet how true it is that gentleness will withstand and triumph over evil as few other characteristics can. It is so allied to divine Love that one can never truly understand it unless the sense of loving-kindness floods the heart. Some one has said that "true gentleness is ...considerateness; it is tenderness of feeling; it is promptitude of sympathy; it is love in its depths and delicacy. It is everything included in that matchless grace the 'gentleness of Christ.'" Then it is a divine quality which all men should desire, and which finally all men must lay hold of if they are to demonstrate Christliness.
Gentleness never presents a stubborn front, but yields so sweetly that it suffers no harm. A blast of sand will cut through a hard, resisting surface, while that which yields receives no hurt. Mrs. Eddy speaks in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 227) of "a life in which the fresh flowers of feeling blossom, and, like the camomile, the more trampled upon, the sweeter the odor they send forth to benefit mankind." Thus we see that the gentleness which is Christlike graciousness need never fear, for however it may seem to be attacked it but becomes purer and lovelier, proving, as some one has said, that "nothing is so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as real strength."
What, a veritable nullifier of a hard heart is gentleness, for they are directly opposite both in nature and tendency! Hardness of heart is considered reprehensible by most men. They generally concede that a hard heart was never anything but a torment to itself. Consciously or unconsciously it but shuts itself out from all that is really desirable, from all that is gentle and good. When the Psalmist declared, "Thy gentleness hath made me great," he opened the door to the understanding of good, which is the complete destroyer of that which is harsh and austere.
