■ '■■''v-".>^^Vc^'^^':■;^^v^^S; ' 
 
 
PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 BV 4812 .C9 1882 ^ 
 
 ^, Cuyler, Theodore L. 1822- 
 1909. 
 God's light on dark clouds 
 
 Shelf. ^y^,r.uo, 
 
GOD'S LIGHT 
 
 ON 
 
 DARK CLOUDS. 
 
 BY 
 
 THEODORE L. CUYLER, 
 
 PASTOR OF LAFAYETTE AVENUE CHURCH, BROOKLYN. 
 
 SrCOND EDITION. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS, 
 
 530 Broadway. 
 
Copyright, 1882, 
 By Robert Carter and Brothers. 
 
 University Press; 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 
 
JAN 181 
 LOQi 
 
 ' •»ii'\ivv%r;vv 
 
 TO 
 
 THE DESPONDING 
 
 AND 
 
 THE BEREAVED, 
 THESE WORDS OF SYMPATHY AND CHEER 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGH 
 
 God's Light on Dark Clouds ....;. 7 
 
 Burning the Barley-field 15 
 
 Weeping and Working 24 
 
 Short Views 29 
 
 Flowers from the Tomb of Jesus .... 37 
 
 Trusting God in the Dark 43 
 
 God's School, and its Lessons 51 
 
 God's Unfoldings 59 
 
 Christ Shepherding his Flock 68 
 
 The Everlasting Arms 77 
 
 Words for the Weary 85 
 
 The Lord Reigneth 93 
 
 Up to the Hills loi 
 
 Right Seeing no 
 
 The Lord our Strength 117 
 
 A Constant Salvation 126 
 
6 CONTENTS. 
 
 Healthy and Happy 134 
 
 The Angels of the Sepulchre 141 
 
 The Night-Lodging and the Day-dawn . 147 
 
 Our Two Homes 155 
 
 Asleep in Jesus 163 
 
 An Autumn Hour in Greenwood .... 172 
 
 E TOIT 
 
 ^ 
 
 
GOD'S LIGHT ON DARK CLOUDS. 
 
 TO-DAY as I sit in my lonely room, 
 this passage of God's Word flies in 
 like a white dove through the window: 
 **And now men see not the bright light 
 which is in the clouds ; but the wind pass- 
 eth and cleanseth [or cleareth] them." To 
 my weak vision, dimmed with tears, the 
 cloud is exceeding dark, but through it 
 stream some rays from the infinite love 
 that fills the Throne with an exceeding and 
 eternal brightness of glory. By and by 
 we may get above and behind that cloud 
 into the overwhelming light. We shall 
 not need comfort then ; we want it now. 
 And for our present consolation God lets 
 
8 GOD'S LIGHT ON DARK CLOUDS, 
 
 through the clouds some clear, strong, 
 distinct rays of love and gladness. 
 
 One truth that beams in through the va- 
 pors is this : God not only reigns, but He 
 governs His world by a most beautiful law 
 of compensations. He setteth one thing, 
 over against another. Faith loves to study 
 the illustrations of this law, notes them in 
 her diary, and rears her pillars of praise 
 for every fresh discovery. I have noticed 
 that the deaf often have an unusual quick- 
 ness of eyesight ; the blind are often gifted 
 with an increased capacity for hearing ; and 
 sometimes when the eye is darkened and 
 the ear is closed, the sense of touch be- 
 comes so exquisite that we are able to con- 
 verse with the sufferer through that sense 
 alone. This law explains why God puts so 
 many of His people under a sharp regimen 
 of hardship and burden-bearing in order 
 that they may be sinewed into strength; 
 why a Joseph must be shut into a prison in 
 order that he may be trained for a palace 
 
GOD'S LIGHT ON DARK CLOUDS. 9 
 
 and for the premiership of the kingdom. 
 Outside of the Damascus Gate I saw the 
 spot where Stephen was stoned into a cruel 
 death ; but that martyr blood was not only 
 the " seed of the Church," but the first 
 germ of conviction in the heart of Saul of 
 Tarsus. This law explains the reason why 
 God often sweeps away a Christian's pos- 
 sessions in order that he may become rich 
 in faith, and why He dashes many persons 
 off the track of prosperity, where they were 
 running at fifty miles the hour, in order 
 that their pride might be crushed, and that 
 they might seek the safer track of humility 
 and holy living. What a wondrous com- 
 pensation our bereaved nation is receiving 
 for the loss of him who was laid the other 
 day in his tomb by the lakeside ! That 
 cloud is already raining blessings, and 
 richer showers may be yet to come. God's 
 people are never so exalted as when they 
 art brought low, never so enriched as when 
 they are emptied, never so advanced as 
 
lO GOD'S LIGHT ON DARK CLOUDS. 
 
 when they are set back by adversity, never 
 so near the crown as when under the cross. 
 One of the sweetest enjoyments of heaven 
 will be to review our own experiences 
 under this law of compensations, and to see, 
 how often affliction worked out for us the 
 exceeding weight of glory. 
 
 There is a great want in all God's peo- 
 ple who have never had the education of 
 sharp trial. There are so many graces 
 that can only be pricked into us by the 
 .puncture of suffering, and so many lessons 
 that can only be learned through tears, 
 that when God leaves a Christian without 
 any trials, He really leaves him to a ter- 
 rible danger. His heart, unploughed by 
 discipline, will be very apt to run to the 
 tares of selfishness, and worldliness, and 
 pride. In a musical instrument there 
 are some keys that must be touched in 
 order to evoke its fullest melodies; God 
 is a wonderful organist, who knows just 
 what heart-chord to strike. In the Black 
 
X}OnS LIGHT ON DARK CLOUDS. II 
 
 Forest of Germany a baron built a castle 
 with two lofty towers. From one tower 
 to the other he stretched several wires, 
 which in calm weather were motionless and 
 silent. When the wind began to blow, the 
 wires began to play like an iEolian harp 
 in the window. As the wind rose into a 
 fierce gale, the old baron sat in his cas- 
 tle and heard his mighty hurricane-harp 
 playing grandly over the battlements. So, 
 while the weather is calm and the skies 
 clear, a great many of the emotions of a 
 Christian's heart are silent. As soon as 
 the wind of adversity smites the chords, 
 the heart begins to play; and when God 
 sends a hurricane of terrible trial you will 
 hear strains of submission and faith, and 
 even of sublime confidence and holy exulta- 
 tion, which could never have been heard in 
 the calm hours of prosperity. Oh, breth- 
 ren, let the winds smite us, if they only 
 make the spices flow; let us not shrink 
 from the deepest trial, if at midnight we 
 can only sing praises to God ! 
 
12 GOD'S LIGHT ON DARK CLOUDS. 
 
 If we want to know what clouds of afflic- 
 tion mean and what they are sent for, we 
 must not flee away from them in fright with 
 closed ears and bandaged eyes. Fleeing 
 from the cloud is fleeing from the Divine 
 love that is behind the cloud. In one of 
 the German picture-galleries is a painting 
 called " Cloudland " ; it hangs at the end 
 of a long gallery, and at first sight it looks 
 like a huge repulsive daub of confused 
 color, without form or comeliness. As you 
 walk towards it the picture begins to take 
 shape ; it proves to be a mass of exquisite 
 little cherub faces, like those at the head 
 of the canvas in Raphael's " Madonna San 
 Sisto." If you come close to the picture, 
 you see only an innumerable company of 
 little angels and cherubim ! How often 
 the soul that is frightened by trial sees noth- 
 ing but a confused and repulsive mass of 
 broken expectations and crushed hopes ! 
 But if that soul, instead of fleeing away into 
 unbelief and despair, would only draw up 
 
GOD'S LIGHT ON DARK CLOUDS. 1 3 
 
 near to God, it would soon discover that 
 the cloud was full of angels of mercy. In 
 one cherub-face it would see " Whom I 
 love I chasten." Another angel would say, 
 "All things work together for good to 
 them that love God." In still another 
 sweet face the heavenly words are coming 
 forth, " Let not your heart be troubled ; 
 believe also in Me. In my Father's house 
 are many mansions. Where I am there 
 shall ye be also." 
 
 To-day my lonely room is vocal with such 
 heavenly utterances. God's ways are not 
 my ways, but they are infinitely better. The 
 cloud is not so dense but love-rays shine 
 through. In time the revealing '' winds shall 
 clear " away the dark and dreadful mystery. 
 Kind words of sympathy steal into the 
 shadowed room of suffering. If Christ 
 does not come in visible form to our Beth- 
 anys, He sends His faithful servants and 
 handmaidens with words of warm, tender 
 condolence. The fourteenth chapter of 
 
14 GOD'S LIGHT ON DARK CLOUDS. 
 
 John never gleams with such a celestial 
 brightness as when we read it under the 
 cloud. No cloud can be big enough to 
 shut out heaven if we keep the eye towards 
 the Throne. And when we reach heaven 
 and see the cloud from God's side, it will 
 be blazing and beaming with the illumina- 
 tions of His love. The Lamb which is in 
 the midst of the throne shall be our Shep- 
 herd, and shall guide us to the fountains of 
 waters of life, and God shall wipe away 
 every tear from our eyes. 
 
 Brooklyn, Oct. 6, 1881. 
 
BURNING THE BARLEY-FIELD. 
 
 A GREAT many precious spiritual truths 
 lie concealed under the out-of-the-way 
 passages of God's Word, like Wordsworth's 
 
 " violet by a mossy stone, 
 Half hidden from the eye." 
 
 s 
 
 If we turn up a certain verse in the four- 
 teenth chapter of the Second Book of 
 Samuel, we shall find such a truth hidden 
 under a historical incident. The incident 
 is on this wise. Absalom, the artful aspir- 
 ant to his father's throne, wishes to have 
 an interview with Joab, the field marshal 
 of David's army. He sends for Joab to 
 come to him, but Joab refuses. Finding 
 that the obstinate old soldier pays no heed 
 
l6 BURNING THE BARLEY-FIELD. 
 
 to his urgent request, he practises a strata- 
 gem. He says to one of his servants : *' See ! 
 Joab's field is next to mine, and he hath 
 barley there. Go and set it on fire ! " And 
 Absalom's servants set the field on fire. 
 Then Joab arose and came to Absalom. 
 
 Now, just as the shrewd young prince 
 dealt with Joab in order to bring him unto 
 him, so God employs a regimen of disci- 
 pline very often in order to bring waj^vard 
 hearts to himself. Many a reader of this 
 article may have had his barley-field set on 
 fire ; there are some even now whose fields 
 are wrapped in flames or are covered with 
 the ashes of extinguished hopes. With 
 backsliders this method is often God's last 
 resort. He sees that the wayward wander- 
 ers care more for their earthly possessions 
 than they do for his honor or his service. 
 So he touches them in the tenderest spot, 
 and sweeps away the objects they love too 
 well. They have become idolaters, and he 
 sternly dashes their idols to atoms. 
 
BURNING THE BARLEY-FIELD. I J 
 
 There was a time when our nation had 
 shamefully backslidden from the funda- 
 mental principles of our Declaration of 
 Independence. The value of cotton crops 
 outweighed the value of liberty. The right- 
 eous God saw that we cared more for the 
 perpetuity of our Union and our prosperity 
 than we did for the rights of four millions 
 of his children. But when the first flash 
 of a national conflagration lighted up the 
 Southern sky, then millions of affrighted 
 voices began to cry out, " Why is our 
 magnificent Union given to the flames?" 
 We could sleep while God's law of right 
 was trampled under foot; but when the 
 national peace and power and pride were 
 trodden down by the same remorseless 
 heel, we awoke, as a man awakes at the 
 cry of " fire " under his own roof-tree. 
 God saw what we prized most, and He 
 touched that. 
 
 In like manner, many an individual sin- 
 ner finds his way to Christ by the light of 
 
1 8 BURNING THE BARLEY-FIELD, 
 
 a burning barley-field. Sometimes the 
 awakening comes in the shape of a bodily 
 chastisement. The impenitent heart has 
 never been moved by sermons and never 
 been brought to repentance by any sense 
 of gratitude for God's mercies. So the All- 
 wise One sends a sharp attack of sickness, 
 in order to reach the diseased and hardened 
 heart. The sinner is laid on his back. He 
 is brought to the very verge of eternity. 
 As a past life of transgression rises before 
 his conscience, and the terrors of a wrath to 
 come seize upon him, he cries out, " God, 
 be merciful to me a sinner ! " When he 
 recovers his health, and goes back into a 
 world that looks very different to him now, 
 his grateful song is, " It was good for me to 
 have been afflicted, for I had gone astray ; 
 my feet had well nigh slipped." I honestly 
 believe that many a sick-bed has delivered 
 the sufferer from a bed in perdition. Pain 
 often drives to prayer. The door that shuts 
 a man out from the world shuts him in to 
 
BURNING THE BARLEY-FIELD. 19 
 
 reflection, and finally into the ark of safety. 
 " There it is," said a young man, as he 
 pointed to a diseased limb, which was eat- 
 ing away his life ; *' and a precious limb it 
 has been to me. It took me away from a 
 career of folly. It brought me to myself, * 
 and to this room of trial, where I have found 
 Christ. I think it has brought me a great 
 way on the road to heaven." It was the 
 testimony of a Christian who had lost his 
 eyesight, after a long confinement to a dark 
 room, *' I could never see Jesus until I 
 became bHnd." 
 
 We sometimes wonder why God takes 
 one of his ministers out of the pulpit and 
 lays him on a bed of dangerous illness. It 
 is to give the man a look over the verge. He 
 gets shorter views of life and of eternity. 
 Three weeks on the couch of pain and peril 
 teach him some things which he never 
 learned in three years at a theological 
 seminary. Sharp bodily affliction, even if 
 it does not endanger life, is often a whole- 
 
20 BURNING THE BARLEY-FIELD. 
 
 some process. Paul's thorn in the flesh, 
 Robert Hall's excruciating pains, and Rich- 
 ard Baxter's physical sufferings were a very 
 expensive part of their education ; but they 
 graduated with higher honor and a brighter 
 crown. Fiery trials make golden Chris- 
 tians. When the balsam-trees in God's 
 garden are cut deep with the knife, they 
 emit the sweetest gums. 
 
 During the last five years a great many 
 barley-fields have been consumed. Brother 
 
 A had his fortune swept away ia the 
 
 commerciahconflagration of 1873; but his 
 heavenly hope was locked up in what was 
 more fire-proof than any iron safe, and his 
 Christian character came out like pure gold 
 from the flames. One of the most benevo- 
 lent and useful Christian merchants in 
 America has lately seen the flames of ruin 
 go through his field of barley, and the earn- 
 ings of an honest life are ashes ! He has an 
 inheritance left yet which the Rothschilds 
 could not buy; and the very loss of his 
 
BURNING THE BARLEY-FIELD. 21 
 
 stocks and " securities " has led him to in- 
 ventory afresh the blessed treasures which 
 he has been laying up in heaven. So, from 
 being a bankrupt, he finds that his best 
 investments are untouched ; and there has 
 been no depreciation in his real estate, which 
 lies very near to the everlasting throne. 
 
 God often sees that a career of unbroken 
 worldly prosperity is becoming very fatal 
 to the soul. Therefore he puts the torch to 
 the barley-field. Not only are the impen- 
 ^itent thus dealt with, to bring them to 
 consider their ways, but his own children 
 are often put through a process which is 
 marvellously improving to their graces, for 
 a career of rapid success is seldom health- 
 ful to piety. Very few even of Christ's 
 choice ones can travel life's railway with 
 perfect safety at forty miles an hour. The 
 heated axle is very apt to snap, or else the 
 engine flies the track of conformity to God 
 and goes off the embankment. 
 
 Prosperity brings out only a few of a 
 
22 BURNING THE BARLEY-FIELD. 
 
 good man's graces ; it often brings out a 
 great many secret lusts, and no little pride, 
 and selfishness and forgetfulness of the 
 Master. When a favorable wind strikes a 
 vessel '* right aft," it only fills a portion of 
 the sails ; when it veers round and strikes 
 it " on the beam," then every inch of can- 
 vas is reached. Good reader, if the Lord 
 is so shifting the winds that they reach thy 
 undeveloped graces of humility, and faith, 
 and patience, and unselfish love, do not be 
 alarmed. He does not mean to swamp 
 thee, or send thee on a lee shore ; he only 
 intends to bring thee into a " better trim " 
 and give thee a more abundant entrance 
 into the desired haven. 
 
 Count up^ all the worldly losses you have 
 had, and see if you are not the gainer, if 
 these losses have but sent you closer to 
 your Saviour. You have less money, per- 
 haps, but more enjoyment of the treasures 
 you found at the cross. You are richer 
 toward God. Perhaps there is a child the 
 
BURNING THE BARLEY-FIELD. 23 
 
 less in that crib now empty, but there is 
 a child the more in glory ; and when the 
 Shepherd took your lamb He drew you 
 nearer to Him and to the fold on high. Our 
 loving God has a purpose in every trial. 
 If any heart-broken reader of these lines 
 is crying out, like Joab, " Wherefore hast 
 thou set my field on fire?" I beseech thee 
 not to flee away from God in petulant 
 despair. He is only burning up thy bar- 
 ley to bring thee closer to Himself. Let 
 the flames light thee to the mercy-seat. 
 The promises will read the brighter. It 
 is better to lose the barley than to lose the 
 blessing. 
 
WEEPING AND WORKING. 
 
 'T^HE smallest verse in the Bible is one 
 ■^ of the largest and deepest in its 
 heavenly pathos, yesus wept. What mys- 
 terious meanings may have lain behind 
 those tears, no one need try to fathom ; but, 
 for one, I prefer to see in them the honest 
 expression of grief for a friend who was 
 dead, and of sympathy for two heart-broken 
 women. Christ's power displayed at that 
 sepulchre overwhelms me ; it was the 
 power of a God. But His pity touches 
 me most tenderly; it was the pity of a 
 man. Those moistened eyes are my Elder 
 Brother's. The sympathy that walked 
 twenty miles to Bethany, that drew Him 
 to those desolate women, that started the 
 
WEEPING AND WORKING. 25 
 
 tears down His cheeks and choked His 
 voice with emotion, — that sympathy Hnks 
 us to Him as the sharer and the bearer 
 of our own sorrows. There is something 
 vicarious in those tears, as there is in the 
 precious blood shed on the cross a few 
 days afterwards. His love seems to " in- 
 sert itself vicariously right into our sor- 
 rows," and He takes the burden right into 
 His own heart. 
 
 But it was a practical sympathy. Had 
 our Lord come to Bethany and taken the 
 two bereaved sisters into their guest- 
 chamber and had- a " good cry " with them, 
 and then gone away and left Lazarus in 
 his grave and them in their grief, it would 
 have been all that our neighbors can do 
 for us when we are in a house of bereave- 
 ment. But it would not have been like 
 Jesus. He did not come to Bethany 
 simply to weep. He came there to work 
 a marvellous miracle of love. He wept as 
 a man ; He worked as the Lord of power 
 
26 WEEPING AND WORKING. 
 
 and glory. He pitied first, and then 
 helped. The same love that moistened 
 His eyes moved His arm to burst open 
 that tomb and bring the dead Lazarus to 
 his feet. A few days afterwards He wept 
 for sinners, and then wrought out salvation 
 for sinners by His own agonies on the cross. 
 Is there no lesson for us in this? What are 
 tears of sympathy worth if we refuse to lift 
 a finger to help the suffering or to relieve 
 distress? And what a mockery it is to 
 weep over the erring and do nothing to save 
 them ! Only when we '* bear one another's 
 burdens " do we *' fulfil the law of Christ." 
 There is another connection that weep- 
 ing has with working. "VVe relieve our own 
 suffering hearts by turning the flood of grief 
 upon some wheel of practical activity. An 
 eminent minister of God who was under a 
 peculiarly bitter trial once said to me, " If 
 I could not study and preach and work to 
 the very utmost, I should go crazy." The 
 millstones grinding upon themselves soon 
 
WEEPING AND WORKING. 2/ 
 
 wear themselves away to powder. But 
 useful occupation is not only a tonic, it is 
 a sedative to the troubled spirit. Instead 
 of looking in upon our own griefs until we 
 magnify them, we should rather look at 
 the 'sorrows of others, in order to lighten 
 and lessen them. 
 
 The poor fisherman, in one of Sir Walter 
 Scott's romances, says to the lady who 
 comes to his cottage after the death of his 
 child : " You rich folk when ye are in 
 trouble may sit wi' yer handkercher to 
 yer een, but we puir bodies maun off to 
 our work agen, even tho' our hearts are 
 thumpin' like a hammer." If the poor fel- 
 low had only known it, he was a great deal 
 better off at his honest work than if he had 
 been idly nursing his grief with the " hand- 
 kercher to his een." Some of the best 
 work ever done for the Master is wrought by 
 His servants when the ''hammer" of afflic- 
 tion is not only beating away on the heart, 
 but is breaking down selfishness and un- 
 
28 WEEPING AND WORKING. - 
 
 belief. When sorrow is allowed to settle 
 in the soul, it often turns the soul into a 
 stagnant fen of bitter waters, out of which 
 sprout the rank rushes of self-will and un- 
 belief and rebellion against God. If that 
 same sorrow is turned outward into cur- 
 rents of sympathy and beneficence, it be- 
 comes a stream of blessings. A baptism 
 of trial is often the best baptism for Christ's 
 service. If tears drive us to toil, then toil 
 will, in turn drive away tears, and give us 
 new and sacred satisfactions. When our 
 blessed Saviour wept, it was on the eve 
 of His mightiest works, once in raising 
 the dead, and once in redeeming a dying 
 world. Weeping and working may even 
 blend profitably together ; for the chiefest 
 of Christ's apostles tells us that during three 
 busy years of his life he ceased not to warn 
 perishing sinners, night and day, with tears. 
 
 " Since Thou on earth hast wept. 
 And sorrowed oft alone, 
 If I must weep with Thee, 
 My Lord, Thy will be done ! " 
 
SHORT VIEWS. 
 
 \ MONG the manifold improvements 
 -^ ^ in the Westminster Revision, we are 
 happy to find that our Lord's discourse 
 against sinful worrying is given in the right 
 English. Our common version of the clos- 
 ing portion of the sixth chapter of Matthew 
 has always been very misleading to the 
 average reader. Christ never commanded 
 us to ** take no thought for the morrow" ; 
 such counsel would contradict common 
 sense, rational prudence, and other ex- 
 plicit commands in the Bible. What our 
 Lord so emphatically forbade was sinful 
 anxiety, or the overloading of to-day's 
 work with worry about the day that has 
 not yet come. The revisers have hit the 
 
30 SHORT VIEWS. 
 
 nail exactly on the head by introducing 
 the word " anxious " into a half-dozen 
 verses of that portion of the Sermon on 
 the Mount. " Be ye not anxious for your 
 life what ye shall eat," &c. *' Which of 
 you by being anxious can add one cubit 
 to the measure of his life?" This whole 
 remonstrance against borrowing trouble in 
 advance is summed up in the happily 
 translated sentence, — " Be not therefore 
 anxious for the morrow; for the morrow 
 will be anxious for itself." 
 
 We may be sure that our blessed Lord 
 knew what was in man when He gave so 
 much space in His sermon to this one tor- 
 menting sin, and repeated six times over 
 His entreaties to avoid it. Worry is not 
 only a sin against God, it is a sin against 
 ourselves. It sometimes amounts to a slow 
 suicide. Thousands have shortened their 
 lives by it, and millions have made their 
 lives bitter by dropping this gall into 
 their souls every day. Honest work very 
 
SHORT VIEWS. 31 
 
 seldom hurts us ; it is worry that kills. I 
 have a perfect right to ask God for a 
 strength equal to the day, but I have no 
 right to ask Him for one extra ounce of 
 strength for to-morrow's burden. When 
 to-morrow comes, grace will come with it, 
 and sufficient for the tasks, the trials, or 
 the troubles. God never has built a Chris- 
 tian strong enough to stand the strain oi 
 present duties and all the tons of to-mor- 
 row's duties and sufferings piled upon the 
 top of them. Paul himself would have 
 broken down. 
 
 There is only one practical remedy for 
 this deadly sin of anxiety, and that is to 
 take short views. Faith is content to live 
 *' from hand to mouth," enjoying each 
 blessing from God as it comes. This per- 
 verse spirit of worry runs off and gathers 
 some anticipated troubles and throws them 
 into the cup of mercies and turns them 
 to vinegar. A bereaved parent sits down 
 by the new-made grave of a beloved child 
 
32 SHORT VIEWS. 
 
 and sorrowfully says to herself, " Well, I 
 have only one more left, and one of these 
 days he may go off to live in a home of 
 his own, or he may be taken away ; and if 
 he dies, my house will be desolate and 
 my heart utterly broken." Now who gave^ 
 that weeping mother permission to use 
 that word "if" ? Is not her trial sore 
 enough now without overloading it with 
 an imaginary trial? And if her strength 
 breaks down, it will be simply because she 
 is not satisfied with letting God afflict her ; 
 she tortures herself with imagined afflic- 
 tions of her own. If she would but take a 
 short view, she would see a living child yet 
 spared to her, to be loved and enjoyed 
 and lived for. Then, instead of having two 
 sorrows, she would have one great posses- 
 sion to set over against a great loss ; her 
 duty to the living would be not only a 
 relief to her anguish, but the best tribute 
 she could pay to the departed. 
 
 That is a short view which only takes in 
 
SHORT VIEWS. 33 
 
 immediate duty to be done, the immediate 
 temptation to be met, and the immediate 
 sorrow to be carried. My friend, if you 
 have money enough to-day for your daily 
 wants and something for God's treasury, 
 don't torment yourself with the idea that 
 you or yours may yet get into an alms- 
 house. If your children cluster around 
 your table, enjoy them, train them, trust 
 them to God, without racking yourself with 
 a dread that the little ones may some time 
 be carried off by the scarlet fever, or the 
 older ones may yet be ill married or may 
 fall into disgrace. Faith carries present 
 loads and meets present assaults and feeds 
 on present promises, and commits the fu- 
 ture to a faithful God. Its song is, — 
 
 " Keep Thou my feet ; I do not ask to see 
 The distant scene ; one step 's enough for me." 
 
 We shall always take that one step more 
 wisely and firmly and successfully if we 
 keep our eye on that only. The man who 
 
34 SHORT VIEWS. 
 
 is climbing the Alps must not look too far 
 ahead, or it will tire him ; he must not look 
 back, or he gets dizzy ; he has but to fol- 
 low his guide, and set his foot on the right 
 spot before him. This is the way you and 
 I must let Christ lead, and have Him so 
 close to us also that it will be but a short 
 view to behold Him. Sometimes young 
 Christians say to me, " I am afraid to make 
 a public confession of Christ, I may not 
 hold out." They have nothing to do with 
 holding 07it ; it is simply their duty to hold 
 071. When future trials and perils come, 
 their Master will give them help for the 
 hour, if they only make sure that they are 
 His. The short view they need to take is 
 a close, clear view of their own spiritual 
 wants, and a distinct view of Jesus as ever 
 at hand to meet those wants. If the fish- 
 ermen of Galilee had worried themselves 
 over the hardships they were to encounter, 
 they might have been frightened out of 
 their apostleships and their eternal crowns. 
 
SHORT VIEWS. 
 
 35 
 
 We ministers need to guard against this 
 malignant devil of worry. It torments one 
 pastor with a dread lest, if he preach cer- 
 tain truths boldly, he may offend his rich 
 pew-holders and drive them away. Let 
 him take care of his conscience, and his 
 Master will take care of him. Another 
 is worried lest his cruse may run dry and 
 his barrel fail. But his cruse has not yet 
 run dry. Oh no, it is his faith that is run- 
 ning low. Some of us, at the beginning 
 of a year's work, are tempted to overload 
 ourselves with the anticipation of how much 
 we have to do ; we need not worry if we 
 will only remember that during the whole 
 year there will be only one working day, 
 and that is — to-day. Sufficient to each 
 day is the labor thereof. 
 
 Once more we say — let us take short 
 views. Let us not climb the high wall till 
 we get to it, or fight the battle till it opens, 
 or shed tears over sorrows that may 
 never come, or lose the joys and blessings 
 
36 
 
 SHORT VIEWS. 
 
 that we have, by the sinful fear that God 
 will take them away from us. We need all 
 our strength and all the grace God can give 
 us for to-day's burdens and to-day's battle. 
 To-morrow belongs to our Heavenly 
 Father : I would not know its secrets if I 
 could. It is far better to know Whom we 
 trust, and that He is able to keep all we 
 commit to Him until the last great day. 
 
FLOWERS FROM THE TOMB OF JESUS. 
 
 OUR LORD was crucified in the season 
 of early flowers. During the month 
 Nisan (or April) the winter rains made veg- 
 etation leap forth into wondrous beauty. 
 The gardens were brilliant with the crocus 
 and the hyacinth, and the plains of Sharon 
 were snowy with the white narcissus. Jesus 
 was buried in a rich man's garden, and no 
 one can tell how many flowers and odorous 
 vines had been planted by the gardener 
 around Joseph's family tomb. The spices 
 within and the plants without may have 
 made the spot in which our dear Master 
 slumbered exceeding fragrant. 
 
 That hallowed tomb was itself buried up 
 centuries ago, and the very spot cannot be 
 
38 FLOWERS PROM THE TOMB OF JESUS. 
 
 identified. But there are certain flowers of 
 grace which will bloom upon the grave 
 of Jesus to the end of time. Faith grows 
 there in beautiful profusion. A sad com- 
 pany of ignorant doubters were those disci- 
 ples In regard to their Master's resurrection ; 
 even when the three women came back from 
 the sepulchre and pronounced it empty, 
 and that they had seen the Saviour alive, 
 some of the Apostles treated it as an " idle 
 tale and believed it not." Thomas stood 
 out until an actual sight of his Lord silenced 
 his unbelief. From that day faith in Christ's 
 victory over death has been a cardinal fea- 
 ture in every Christian's creed. With it is 
 linked that other faith that if Jesus rose 
 again, so would every one who *' sleeps in 
 Jesus " rise also from the dust. This peren- 
 nial flower of faith, which blooms like cer- 
 tain roses in all seasons, has been set out 
 on innumerable graves all over our death- 
 cursed world. It grows on the little mound 
 that covers my dear boy ; I seem to see it 
 
FLOWERS PROM THE TOMB OF JESUS. 39 
 
 all over among the hillocks of Green- 
 wood. 
 
 Hope is another fragrant flower that 
 springs from the buriah sod. On one leaf 
 of the plant we read, " I am the Resurrec- 
 tion and the Life ; he that believeth in Me, 
 though he were dead, 7^/ shall he live!' On 
 another leaf is inscribed, '' Sorrow not as 
 others that have no hope ; for if Jesus died 
 and rose again, even so them also which 
 sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him." 
 The expectation of every pastor, that he 
 shall yet '' break ground " and ascend with 
 his flock, cheers his soul when he stands 
 beside the grave in which his faithful ones 
 are being laid, dust to dust. This hope 
 is an anchor that has held many a poor 
 heart-broken mother who has moistened 
 her darling's resting place with her tears. 
 To her Jesus draws nigh and says, " Weep 
 not; this child shall rise again." And so 
 she tills that little sacred soil until it is 
 covered over with the blossoms of hope 
 
40 FLOWERS FROM THE TOMB OF JESUS. 
 
 as thick as white HHes of the valley. The 
 original seeds of this fair flower came from 
 Christ's tomb in the garden. It grows best 
 when it is watered by prayer. That is 
 a desolate grave indeed over which there 
 does not creep out a single sprig or blade 
 of Hope ! 
 
 Are these all the flowers which thrive in 
 the hallowed mould in which Christ's suc- 
 cessors lie? No! There is one modest 
 lily called Resignation. Jesus Himself de- 
 clared that it was better that He should 
 have died, for He said that He " ought to 
 have suff'ered and to enter into His glory." 
 His road to glory lay through the tomb, 
 and so must ours. Never did our Lord set 
 this world above the better world. He only 
 brought three' persons back to life (that 
 we read of), and then only for a high and 
 especial purpose to be gained. There is 
 a legend that the first thing Lazarus said 
 after his resurrection was, " Shall I have to 
 die again?" On being told that he must, 
 
FLOWERS FROM THE TOMB OF JESUS. 41 
 
 it is said that he never smiled afterward. 
 Truly, if some of the crowned ones in Par- 
 adise were driven back to this sin-stained 
 earth, they might well wear mourning for 
 their own bereavement. To die is gain ! 
 That is the sweet word which I detect in 
 every bud and leaf on the plant of Resig- 
 nation. God hath better things in store 
 for us; His will, not ours, be done. 
 
 It may seem a strange place to set out 
 the flower of Thankfulness ; but that, too, 
 grows and emits its sweetness from Christ's 
 sepulchre and those of His followers. Paul, 
 standing by that grave over which Jesus 
 had triumphed, shouts aloud, " Thanks be 
 to God who giveth us the victory through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord." His triumph over 
 death is our triumph. Because He rose 
 and lives again, we shall live also. 
 
 Not only on Easter Sabbaths are these 
 flowers to be found on our Lord's emptied 
 sepulchre, but every day, in every clime, 
 wherever death hollows a grave, these 
 
42 FLOWERS FROM THE TOMB OF JESUS. 
 
 precious plants of grace may be made to 
 bloom, and to scatter their delicious per- 
 fumes. Perhaps some sorrowing child of 
 God may read these lines and inquire, 
 *' Where shall I go to find faith and hope, 
 and resignation for yonder freshly piled 
 mound over my dead?" We answer, Go 
 to the tomb where Jesus vanquished death, 
 — in the garden. 
 
TRUSTING GOD IN THE DARK. 
 
 SOMETIMES we have an experience in 
 life that seems Hke walking through a 
 long dark tunnel. The chiUing air and the 
 thick darkness make it hard walking, and 
 the constant wonder is why we are com- 
 pelled to tread so gloomy a path, while 
 others are in the open day of health and 
 happiness. We can only fix our eyes on 
 the bright light at the end of the tunnel, 
 and we comfort ourselves with the thought 
 that every step we take brings us nearer to 
 the joy and the rest that lie at the end of 
 the way^ Extinguish the light of heaven 
 that gleams in the distance, and this tun- 
 nel of trial would become a horrible tomb. 
 Some of us are passing through just such 
 
44 TRUSTING GOD IN THE DARK, 
 
 an experience now. We can adopt the 
 plaintive language of the Psalmist and cry 
 out : ** Thy hand presseth us sore ; as for 
 the light of our eyes, it also is gone from 
 us ; we are ready to halt, and our sorrow is 
 continually before us." 
 
 One of the most trying features of our 
 trial is that we cannot discover the *' why " 
 or the " wherefore " of our special afflic- 
 tions. Our Heavenly Father did not con- 
 sult us before the trial came, and He does 
 not explain to us why He sent it. His 
 ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts 
 our thoughts ; nay, they are the very oppo- 
 site. The mystery of the providence per- 
 plexes and staggers us. For example, I 
 open my daily journal, and read that the 
 Bishop of Jerusalem, whom I left a few 
 months ago in the prime of vigorous health 
 and wide usefulness, is cut off in the midst 
 of his days. All his preparatory training 
 for his office by eighteen years of mission- 
 ary life comes to naught. This very day I 
 
TRUSTING GOD IN THE DARK. 45 
 
 am called for the sixth time in a few years 
 to bury the dead from a certain Christian 
 household. This time it is the head of the 
 house that is taken, and the children are 
 left to orphanage. Beside me now sits a 
 mourning mother, whose aching heart can- 
 not understand why a beloved child is 
 snatched away when she seemed the most 
 indispensable to the happiness of the home. 
 Every week a pastor has to confront these 
 mysteries in the dealings of a God of love. 
 To the torturing question, *' Why does God 
 lead me into this valley of the shadow of 
 darkness?" we can only reply, *' Even so, 
 Father, for so it seems good in Thy sight." 
 We are brought into the tunnel, however 
 we shrink back. There is no retreat; we 
 have nothing left to us but to grasp the 
 very Hand that brought us there and push 
 forward. Like Bunyan's Pilgrim, we can 
 only say, " I see not but that my road to 
 heaven lieth through this very valley." 
 Just in such trying hours it is that the 
 
46 TRUSTING GOD IN THR DARK. 
 
 Adversary assails us most fiercely. He 
 stirs up in our hearts bitter thoughts 
 against God. He points us to the actual 
 and realized loss, and tells us that heaven 
 is utterly unseen, and no one comes back 
 to assure us of its reality. And so he 
 endeavors, with devilish suggestions, to 
 blow out such lamps of divine promise as 
 we have, to shatter every staff that we 
 carry, and to make the pathway of trial 
 more dark and desperate than before. 
 This is not fancy ; it is the actual trial to 
 which the faith of thousands of God's peo- 
 ple is at this moment subjected. Under 
 these severe experiences more than one 
 Christian has been sorely tempted to turn 
 infidel, and to *' choose death rather than 
 Hfe." 
 
 To my own mind there is only one solu- 
 tion for these mysteries and only one sup- 
 port for these days of terrible affliction. 
 The only relief I can find is in the certainty 
 that this life is not the end, but simply 
 
TRUSTING GOD IN THE DARK. 47 
 
 the prepa7'atory school for the real and the 
 endless life that is beyond. The moment 
 that I accept this truth fully and hold 
 it firmly, I find solid ground for my feet 
 and light for my sorrowing soul. Then 
 I discover that the whole journey of the 
 believer is *' portioned out" to him, and 
 that the dark tunnel on the road is just 
 as. surely appointed wisely as is the most 
 flowery mead or the happiest walk over 
 the " Delectable Mountains." Nay, more. 
 When we reach heaven, we may discover 
 that the richest and deepest and most prof- 
 itable experiences we had in this world 
 were those which were gained in the very 
 roads from which we shrank back with 
 dread. The bitter cups we tried to push 
 away contained the medicines we most 
 needed. The hardest lessons that we learn 
 are those which teach us the most and best 
 fit us for service here and glory hereafter. 
 It is the easiest thing in the world to obey 
 God when He commands us to do what we 
 
43 TRUSTING GOD IN THE DARK. 
 
 like, and to trust Him when the path is all 
 sunshine. The real victory of faith is to 
 trust God in the dark and through the 
 dark. Let us be assured of this, that, if 
 the lesson and the rod are of His appointing, 
 and that His all-wise love has engineered 
 the deep tunnels of trial on the heaven- 
 ward road. He will never desert us during 
 the discipline. The vital thing for us is, 
 not to deny and desert Him. 
 
 Let us also keep in mind that the chief 
 object of the discipline is to develop char- 
 acter and to improve the graces of His 
 children. Whom He loveth He chasteneth, 
 and correcteth every son whom He receiv- 
 eth. Every branch that beareth not fruit 
 He prwieth it, that it may bring forth more 
 fruit. " Why do you cut that pomegranate- 
 bush so cruelly?" said a gentleman to his 
 gardener. The answer was, *' Because it is 
 all running to useless leaves, and I want 
 to make it bear'' Ah ! it is a keen knife 
 that our Divine Gardener employs, and 
 
TRUSTING GOD IN THE DARK. 49 
 
 He often severs the very heartstrings by 
 His discipline ; but " afterward it yieldeth 
 peaceable fruit unto them that have been 
 exercised thereby, even the fruit of right- 
 eousness." God has a great many crucibles 
 for His gold, where He may refine it. There 
 is so much alloy of pride and self-will, or 
 covetousness, or sinful idolatry in genuine 
 Christians that they require the *' fining- 
 pot" and the furnace. Sometimes pros- 
 perity is tenfold more damaging to us than 
 sharp adversity. A fit of sickness may do 
 more for soul-health than years of bodily 
 strength and comfort. 
 
 To all my readers who are wondering 
 why a loving God has subjected them so 
 often to the furnace, my only answer is, that 
 God owns you and me, and He has a right to 
 do with us just as He pleases. If He wants 
 to keep His silver over a hot flame until He 
 can see His own countenance reflected in 
 the metal, then He has a right to do so. It 
 is the Lord, it is my loving Teacher, it is 
 
 4 
 
50 TRUSTING GOD IN THE DARK. 
 
 my Heavenly Father ; let Him do what 
 seemeth Him good. He will not lay on 
 one stroke in cruelty, or a single one that 
 He cannot give me grace to bear. Life's 
 school-days and nights will soon be over. 
 Pruning-time will soon be ended. The 
 crucibles will not be needed in heaven. 
 
 So, to all my fellow-sufferers who are 
 threading their way through the tunnels of 
 trial, I would say : Tighten your loins with 
 the promises, and keep the strong staff ot 
 faith well in hand. Trust God in the dark. 
 We are safer with Him in the dark than 
 without Him in the sunshine. He will not 
 suffer thy foot to stumble. His rod and 
 His staff never break. Why He brought 
 us here we know not now, but we shall 
 know hereafter. At the end of the gloomy 
 passage beams the heavenly light. Then 
 comes the exceeding and eternal weight 
 of glory ! 
 
GOD'S SCHOOL, AND ITS LESSONS. 
 
 A CERTAIN gray-haired pupil in the 
 ■^ ^ school of his Heavenly Father once* 
 said, " O God, Thou hast tatcght me 
 from my youth." His experience in that 
 school had been very remarkable, from his 
 early beginnings among the sheep-cotes 
 of Bethlehem. Constantly seeking instruc- 
 tion, he had prayed, " Teach me Thy stat- 
 utes," " Teach me Thy way," " Teach me 
 to do Thy will." Sharp schooling had he 
 received in those days of humiliation when 
 a traitor-son drove him out of Jerusalem. 
 Terrible punishment did he bring upon 
 himself once when '' lust brought forth sin, 
 and sin brought forth death," in the crime 
 against Uriah. But had David not been 
 
5i GOD'S SCHOOL, AND ITS LESSONS. 
 
 under the instruction and discipline of the 
 Holy Spirit, we never would have had 
 many of the richest, profoundest, and 
 most majestic Psalms, — many of their 
 most piercing wails and of their most 
 jubilant thankgsivings. 
 
 That same school in which David was a 
 pupil nearly thirty centuries ago is open 
 yet. The term-time is as long as life lasts. 
 It has its recreations and its rewards and 
 its medals of honor, but no vacations. 
 School is never " out" until death comes 
 to the door and beckons the pupil away. 
 And oh ! how happy many a scholar has 
 been when the messenger has said to his 
 heart, " Now, my child, you have learned 
 the hard lessons, and have finished your 
 course ; now you may come homer 
 
 Of this wonderful school God Himself 
 is the Principal or Superintendent. The 
 supreme purpose of it is to form character 
 and to fit the immortal soul for the after- 
 life of eternity. If there is no immortality 
 
GOD'S SCHOOL, AND ITS LESSONS. 53 
 
 of being, and If *' death ends all," then this 
 world is an utter failure, and what we call 
 Providence becomes an unintelligible jar- 
 gon. The moment we recognize the fact 
 that this life is only a training-school to fit 
 us for a coming world, that the Bible is its 
 infallible text-book and the Holy Spirit 
 its instructor and the Lord of glory its 
 all-wise and all-loving Head, then dark 
 things become light, seemingly crooked 
 things become straight, and mysteries 
 become plain. If I am only a scholar, I 
 must submit to the rod for my own correc- 
 tion, and remember Who hath appointed it. 
 If I am only a scholar, I must spell out the 
 hard lessons and submit to the sharp tasks, 
 even though the pages of my diary be 
 often blotted with tears; the things that 
 I understand not now, I " shall know here- 
 after," when I have graduated into heaven. 
 My Divine Teacher seems to have two 
 great methods in this earthly school of His, 
 — instruction and discipline. I am utterly 
 
54 GOD'S SCHOOL, AND ITS LESSONS. 
 
 ignorant and terribly wayward, therefore I 
 need both ; and they often blend together. 
 Part of my instruction I get from His won- 
 drous Word, and it is very inspiring and 
 fascinating. A part I receive from the 
 Holy Spirit's^ work, and it is very sanctify- 
 ing. But no part of our schooling costs 
 so dearly or yields such gracious fruits as 
 the process of chastisement. The most 
 famous teacher in Philadelphia, in his day, 
 once said to a rich, indulgent father, " You 
 must take your boy out of my school if 
 you are not willing to have me chastise 
 him ; he and the school too will be ruined 
 if I have no disciplined 
 
 Our Heavenly Teacher conducts His 
 training-school for the very salvation of 
 His scholars, and thus for His own honor 
 and glory. The very word *' disciple " 
 {disciptclus) signifies a little scholar. The 
 first essential to discipleship of the Lord 
 Jesus was the willingness to deny self and 
 to bear a cross at His bidding. That prin- 
 
GOD'S SCHOOL, AND ITS LESSONS. 5 5 
 
 ciple runs through all the deepest, richest 
 Christian experience, and will do so, I 
 suppose, to the end of time. Often when 
 the hard lesson starts the tears, and the 
 aching heart cries out in anguish, the hand 
 of the dear Master points up to the words : 
 *' As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten : 
 be zealous therefore, and repent." " Whom 
 the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and 
 scourgeth every son whom He receiveth. 
 . . . No chastening for the present seemeth 
 to be joyous, but grievous : nevertheless 
 afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of 
 righteousness." It is the " afterward " that 
 justifies the rod and reconciles us to the 
 stroke. Grand old Richard Baxter ex- 
 claimed after a life of hard toil and con- 
 stant suffering, '' O God, I thank Thee for 
 a bodily discipline of eight and fifty years." 
 Paul was indulging in no hypocritical cant 
 when he said, '' I rejoice in tribulation." 
 God's ripest and most royal scholars are 
 made such by an expensive education. 
 
56 GOD'S SCHOOL, AND ITS LESSONS. 
 
 His brightest gold comes out of the hot- 
 test furnace. 
 
 In this school of grace He employs many- 
 tutors. Sometimes He employs Poverty, 
 which does for the soul what it did for the 
 minds of such hard-faring youths as Hugh 
 Miller and James A. Garfield, it sinews 
 the strength and develops force. More 
 than one Christian who was getting too 
 prosperous for his spiritual good has been 
 turned over to this severe tutor, and he 
 has sent him down to an humbler bench. 
 As the purse was emptied, the soul grew 
 richer in humility, and began to bear the 
 fruits of the Spirit. 
 
 Another of God's tutors is Disappoint- 
 ment ; and some of the best lessons in life 
 are taught us by that stern-visaged school- 
 master. One of his lessons is that this 
 world was not made solely for us, and our 
 loss is often another man's gain. A 
 second lesson is that our losses are often 
 the very richest blessings. We had *' de- 
 
GOD'S SCHOOL, AND ITS LESSONS. 57 
 
 vised a way" for ourselves, and it would 
 have led to certain danger. God could not 
 have sent a severer judgment on us than 
 to let us have our own way ; so He sent 
 disappointment to drive us back. We 
 cried out bitterly at first, but by and by we 
 saw what we had escaped, and blessed the 
 Hand that had smitten us in the face. If I 
 ever reach heaven, I shall feel like rearing 
 a monument there of gratitude to the stern- 
 visaged old tutor who so often helped me 
 on by putting me back, and stripped me 
 that I might travel heavenward the lighter 
 and the freer. 
 
 Ah, brethren, this is a marvellous 
 school which Divine Wisdom has opened, 
 and a Father's love is superintending! 
 He never spares the rod when the child is 
 in danger of being spoiled. His pruning- 
 knife cuts deep, but the clusters of grapes 
 are all the larger and the sweeter. When 
 Michael Angelo saw a block of marble 
 lying in the dirt, he said, "There is an 
 
58 GOD'S SCHOOL, AND ITS LESSONS. 
 
 angel in that marble, and I will bring it 
 out." His hammer and chisel struck hard 
 and deep, till the angel came forth. God's 
 hammer of trial, blow on blow, brings out 
 such angels as Faith, and sweet-visaged 
 Peace, and strong-limbed Patience, and 
 Sympathy, and the Love that has the like- 
 ness of Jesus Christ. 
 
 This school of God will soon close for 
 us ; the term-time is shortening every 
 hour. Let us not shirk a lesson, however 
 hard, or wince under a rod of chastisement, 
 however sore and heavy. The richer will 
 be the crown if we endure to the end and 
 graduate into glory. What a promotion 
 will that be for hearts that so often ached, 
 and for eyes that so often wept, and for 
 the faith that so often bled under the blow, 
 — to be lifted into the magnificent inher- 
 itance of the saints in light ! 
 
GOD'S UNFOLDINGS. 
 
 OITTING to-day in Christ's school (for 
 ^^ that is an essential idea of His Church), 
 let me say a few words to my fellow- 
 scholars. The meek and the teachable will 
 He guide in His way. There is room for 
 us all in that spot where Mary sat, — at the 
 feet of Jesus. And the encouragement to 
 us is : '* Call unto Me, and I will answer 
 thee, and shew thee great and mighty things 
 which thou knowest not." This does not 
 mean everything, even though our hearts 
 may ache to find out many mysteries. 
 The " secret things belong unto God." 
 Over certain doors the inscription is af- 
 fixed : *' No admittance here." In heaven 
 
6o GOD'S UNFOLDINGS. 
 
 we may know these things even as we are 
 known; but now they are wisely hidden 
 from our eyes. 
 
 Yet our all-wise and loving God is con- 
 stantly unfolding Himself to His earthly 
 children. All scientific discovery is the 
 passage from the unknown into the known ; 
 every truth discovered is a fresh unfolding 
 of the Creator. Very slowly, very grad- 
 ually is this progress effected. Centuries 
 passed away before Galileo found out the 
 rotation of the earth, and Newton the law 
 of gravitation. Other generations must 
 roll by before man learned enough about 
 God's laws of electro-magnetism to fashion 
 the ocean telegraph. Yet these laws- were 
 all in existence in the days of Noah and 
 Abraham; only they had not yet been 
 unfolded. I once spent a night on Mount 
 Righi, and there was nothing visible for 
 a rood from my window. But when the 
 morning broke, the icy crowns of the Jung- 
 frau and the Schreckhorn began to glitter 
 
GOD'S UNFOLDINGS.] 6 1 
 
 in the early beams. They had been there 
 all the night, waiting for the unfoldings of 
 the dawn. Even so have all God's laws 
 of the material universe and all His pur- 
 poses of redeeming mercy through Jesus 
 Christ been in existence from the begin- 
 ning. They only waited for the dayspring 
 of discovery. And one of the most de- 
 lightful occupations of a devout mind is 
 to watch the unfoldings of God, and to 
 drink in new truths as He gradually reveals 
 them. 
 
 The more closely I study my Bible, the 
 more I detect a steady progress of divine 
 doctrine, from the first line of Genesis to 
 the closing grandeur of the Apocalypse. 
 That little altar of turf on which Abel lays 
 his lamb points onward to Calvary. The 
 whole Jewish dispensation goes on step by 
 step until the Messiah comes. Then I find 
 four sections of the Book which photograph 
 the life of Jesus to me, each one presenting 
 some particular view of my Saviour's face 
 
62 GOD'S UNFOLDINGS. 
 
 and footsteps, and miracles and teachings. 
 Calvary and the resurrection only prepare 
 the way for the descent of the Holy Spirit. 
 Then comes the visible manifestation of the 
 Gospel in the conversion and organization 
 of the Primitive Church. Peter's tongue, 
 and Paul's brain, and John's heart, and Dor- 
 cas's needle all get into motion. These new 
 converts require spiritual instruction, and 
 the whole series of inspired epistles are 
 produced. The man or the minister who 
 asserts that the writings of the four evan- 
 gelists are " Bible enough for him," and 
 that the epistles of Paul are only excel- 
 lent surplusage, worthy of small attention, 
 simply writes himself down an ignoramus. 
 There is as veritable an unfolding of heav- 
 enly truth in the eighth chapter to the 
 Romans as in the Sermon on the Mount. 
 And when the laws of our spiritual life have 
 been unfolded in the inspired epistles of 
 Paul, John, Peter, and James, then the 
 magnificent panorama of the Apocalypse 
 
GOD'S UNFOLDINGS. 6^ 
 
 is unrolled, and we get a glimpse of Christ's 
 final triumphs and the glory of His celestial 
 kingdom. After John lays down his pen, 
 History takes up hers, and carries us on 
 through the martyrdoms of saints, and the 
 councils, and the conflicts, and the Refor- 
 mation period, and the inauguration of 
 modern missions to the nations who sit in 
 (^arkness. At the foot of every page she 
 writes, "■ The earth is the Lord's, and the 
 fulness thereof." 
 
 In no direction do we behold more won- 
 derful unfoldings of God than in what we 
 call His Providence. This is a department 
 of God's school in which we are learning: 
 fresh lessons every day. In Providence, 
 divine wisdom is married to divine love. 
 All things work together for good to them 
 who love God and trust Him. The sceptic 
 jeers at this, but the trusting Christian 
 knows it from actual experience. It is 
 often a dear-bought experience, for some 
 of God's truths are knocked into us by 
 
64 GOD'S UNFOLDINGS. 
 
 hard blows, and some lessons are spelled 
 out through eyes cleansed with tears. 
 Our perverse mistake is that we demand 
 that God shall explain Himself at every 
 step, instead of waiting for Him to unfold 
 His intricate purposes at His own time and 
 
 in His own way. Why A is set up and 
 
 good Brother B (who seems equally 
 
 deserving) is cast down ; why the only 
 little crib in one Christian home is emp- 
 tied by death, and the nursery in another 
 home is full of happy voices ; why one 
 good enterprise prospers and another one 
 is wrecked, — all such perplexing puzzles 
 shake terribly the faith that is not well 
 grounded on the Rock. 
 
 To all these pitiable outcries the calm 
 answer of our Heavenly Father is : *'Be still, 
 and know that I am God. I lead the blind 
 by a way they know not. What I do 
 thou knowest not now, but thou shalt 
 know hereafter." These are the voices of 
 love which come to us from behind the 
 
GOD'S UNFOLDINGS. 65 
 
 cloud. If we wait patiently, the cloud will 
 break away or part asunder, and our eyes 
 will behold the Rainbow of Mercy over- 
 arching the Throne. Twenty years ago, 
 on a day of thick fog and storm, I as- 
 cended Mount Washington by the old 
 bridle-path. Over the slippery boulders 
 we picked our toilsome way, unable to see 
 anything but our sure-footed horse and our 
 guide. A sulky company were we when 
 we reached the "Tip-top House." But 
 presently a strong wind swept away the 
 banks of mist, and revealed the magnificent 
 landscape from the mountain's base to the 
 great wide sea. As the wonderful vision 
 unfolded itself to our delighted eyes, we 
 could mark the pathway by which we had 
 been led up to that mount of discovery. 
 Tenfold more delightful was the outlook 
 because we had gained it by such hard 
 toil and it had been so long hidden from 
 our sight. 
 
 That day's experience was a sermon to 
 5 
 
66 GOD'S UNFOLDINGS, 
 
 my soul. It taught me afresh just how a 
 believer must leave God to order his foot- 
 steps, and how he must wait for God to 
 unfold the hidden purposes of His love. 
 Faith's stairways are steep and slippery. 
 They can only be climbed by a sure foot 
 and a steady hold on the Unseen Hand. 
 In the hard clamber we are often thrown 
 down on our knees. Cry as loudly as we 
 may In the driving mist for " more light," 
 we do not receive any other answer than 
 this: "Fear not! Only trust!'' If we 
 unloose our hold on God's hand for an 
 instant, we go over the precipice. But the 
 more tightly we cling, the steadier we walk ; 
 the more willing we are to be humbled, the 
 more certain are we to get upward ; the 
 more crosses we bear for Christ, the lighter 
 will be our hearts; and by and by we 
 shall reach that gate of pearl, the opening 
 of which will unfold to us the everlast- 
 ing flood of glory. These are among 
 the thoudits which came into my mind 
 
GOD'S UNFOLDINGS. 
 
 67 
 
 as I have sat to-day in Christ's school, 
 while some of the scholars around me have 
 been singing ; but, alas ! some others are 
 sobbing and weeping. 
 
CHRIST SHEPHERDING HIS FLOCK. 
 
 /^NE of the most beautiful improve- 
 ^-^ ments of the new Revision of the Tes- 
 tament is that which makes the seventeenth 
 verse of the seventh chapter of the Revela- 
 tion to read thus : " The Lamb which is in 
 the midst of the throne s/ia/l be their Shep- 
 herd, and shall guide them unto fountains 
 of waters of life." This carries on into the 
 heavenly world one of the most tender and 
 profound relations which Jesus bears to 
 His redeemed followers. To us, in our 
 land and times, this Oriental figure loses 
 much of the vividness that it has to one 
 who visits Palestine and sees a Judaean shep- 
 herd among his flock. He is the master 
 of a household of sheep, — as much at- 
 
CHRIST SHEPHERDING HIS FLOCK, 69 
 
 tached to his fleecy friends as daily inter- 
 course and nightly watchings and personal 
 exposures for them could make him. He 
 searches out fresh pasturage for them ; if 
 a sheep is caught in a thicket, he hastens 
 to rescue it; if a lamb falls into a swollen 
 torrent, he is at hand to lift it out; if a 
 wild beast shows himself at night near the 
 sleeping flock, the shepherd seizes club 
 or crook and gives him battle. Not only 
 the savage beast, but the Bedouin rob- 
 ber must sometimes be encountered. Dr. 
 Thomson, in his '* Land and Book," says 
 that one faithful fellow, between Tabor and 
 Tiberias, instead of fleeing, actually fought 
 three Bedouins, until he was hacked to 
 pieces with their kJiaiijarSy and died among 
 the sheep he was defending. 
 
 *' I am the Good Shepherd. I lay down 
 My life for the sheep." This is the supreme 
 act of His devotion to His flock. To ana- 
 lyze the theology of the Atonement is for 
 most believers as bootless as an attempt 
 
70 CHRIST SHEPHERDING HIS FLOCK. 
 
 to analyze the maternal feeling before a 
 mother who has just given the parting kiss 
 to a dying daughter. The Christian's 
 heart understands the Atonement better 
 than the Christian's head. It is a difficult 
 doctrine for the brain, but a sweet and 
 simple one to the affections. Jonathan 
 Edwards himself could not apprehend the 
 Atonement one whit more clearly or feel 
 it more intensely than the Dairyman's 
 Daughter, when she sang to herself, — 
 
 " How glorious was the grace 
 
 When Christ sustained the stroke ! 
 His life and blood the Shepherd pays, 
 A ransom for the flock." 
 
 True faith simply believes what Jesus said, 
 and rests implicitly on what Jesus did for 
 us and will do for us to the end. This is 
 the core of my practical theology, and so 
 it is with millions of others. All we were 
 but sheep going astray, and God hath laid 
 on Him, the Divine Shepherd, the iniqui- 
 ties of us all. This tells the whole story as 
 
CHRIST SHEPHERDING HIS FLOCK. 7 1 
 
 to the ground of my hope for salvation ; 
 this, too, establishes such a relation between 
 me and my Shepherd, that I am under 
 supreme obligation to follow Him whither- 
 soever He leadeth. If we ever expect to 
 be guided by Him to fountains of waters 
 of life in heaven, we must learn here to 
 submit to His guidance completely. 
 
 Three things our beloved Shepherd 
 assures us. The first one is, *' I know Mine 
 own sheep." He does not recognize them 
 by any church-mark, for some persons 
 may hide an unbelieving, unrenewed heart 
 beneath a false profession ; others, who 
 never have enrolled themselves in any visi- 
 ble church-membership, may belong to the 
 blood-bought flock. Jesus recognized the 
 penitent sinner through her tears as dis- 
 tinctly as He saw through Judas behind his 
 treacherous kiss. It is a precious thought 
 to a true believer, however obscure in lot or 
 however overlooked or misunderstood by 
 others, — " My Master knows me. He has 
 
72 CHRIST SHEPHERDING HIS FLOCK. 
 
 me on His heart. He is a brother to my 
 griefs. He knows what pasture I require ; 
 yes, and He understands when I need the 
 chastising stroke. He detects my sins ; 
 therefore let me be watchful against temp- 
 tation. He sees all my tears or my heart- 
 aches ; therefore let me be cheerful under 
 sharp trials." 
 
 The second thing our Shepherd assures 
 us is : *' Mine own know Me." This knowl- 
 edge is gained by a sacred instinct. His 
 own know Him by the witness of the 
 Spirit that witnesseth with their spirits. 
 How do I know my mother? By some- 
 body else's description of her, by her 
 picture, by an analysis of her mental qual- 
 ities? No; I know her by the instincts 
 of love. I have tested her sweet fidelities. 
 I believe in her both for what she is to 
 me and what she has done for me. The 
 sincere Christian has a heart-knowledge 
 which is gained by being sought out by 
 the Shepherd, saved by the Shepherd, and 
 
CHRIST SHEPHERDING HIS FLOCK. 73 
 
 by trusting and following the Shepherd. 
 Of this experimental knowledge no scoffer 
 can outwit him and no enemy can rob him. 
 He has heard Christ's voice when He 
 *' calleth His own sheep by name and lead- 
 eth them out." No one can counterfeit 
 that voice. Sometimes in Palestine or 
 Syria 'a stranger will try to mimic the shep- 
 herd's call ; but the flock pay no heed to 
 it. As soon as the genuine voice is heard 
 every head is up and the flock is in motion. 
 The third thing that Jesus assures us is, 
 that " He goeth before His sheep, and they 
 follow Him." Ah, what pathways of trial 
 He sometimes appoints to us ! Never has 
 He promised us an easy road or a smooth 
 road, or such a road as our selfishness may 
 select. He never consents that the flock 
 shall decide as to the lot in which they 
 shall be pastured, or over what steep hills 
 He shall conduct them, or through what 
 valleys of the death-shade they shall walk, 
 listening to His voice through the dark. 
 
74 CHRIST SHEPHERDING HIS FLOCK. 
 
 More than once faith stumbles and falls, 
 but He lifts up and restores. Sometimes 
 the burden breaks us down; but He says 
 tenderly, *' Cast that burden on Me." 
 Sometimes we cry out in anguish for some 
 lost treasure of heart and home; but His 
 firm reply is, "Your treasure I will take 
 care of. FOLLOW Me." Whom he loves 
 He chastens, and in proportion to the love 
 is the discipline. The trial that tests 
 graces and purifies character must be some- 
 thing more than a pin-scratch. It must cut 
 deep, it must try us ; and sharply too, or 
 it does not deserve the name. It is hard 
 to be poor while others prosper; it is hard 
 to lie still and suffer while godless mirth 
 goes laughing by the door; it is hard to 
 lose our only wee lamb while our neigh- 
 bor's fireside is surrounded by a group of 
 rosy-cheeked children ; it is hard to drink 
 the very cup that we prayed might pass 
 from us : but the loving Shepherd comes 
 very near at such times, and puts His arm 
 
CHRIST SHEPHERDING HIS FLOCK. 75 
 
 about us and says : " I know Mine own, 
 and Mine own must trust Me. If Mine, 
 then an heir to all I have. Where I am, 
 there thou shalt be ; let not thy heart be 
 troubled. What is poverty, or failure, or 
 sickness, or bereavement to thee ? Folloiv 
 Me. If thy feet are sore, the green pas- 
 tures will be all the softer by and by. If 
 thy cross is heavy, I have borne a heavier 
 one. Let Me share this with thee. Shall 
 the disciple be above his Master? Shall 
 the sheep fare better than the Shepherd?" 
 And so through every step in life the 
 Shepherd offers to guide us, if we will but 
 hear His voice and follow Him. He never 
 promises us smooth paths, but He does 
 promise safe ones. When we obey His 
 voice, we may often be called to severe 
 toils and self-denials, to encounter opposi- 
 tion and to perform services of love to the 
 unlovable and the thankless ; but we shall 
 never be called to sacrifice a principle or 
 commit a sin. Our Shepherd will never 
 
76 CHRIST SHEPHERDING HIS F LOGIC, 
 
 lead us to a precipice of error or into a 
 quagmire of doubt. He will never lead 
 us into sensual temptations or up dizzy- 
 heights of vain-glory. If we follow Him 
 we may find the steepest cliff a '* path of 
 pleasantness" and the lowest vale of humil- 
 iation a highway to peace. Brethren of the 
 flock, we may have some hard climbing 
 yet before we reach heaven. Let us keep 
 close to the Shepherd and take short views. 
 If we look down, we may get dizzy ; if we 
 look too far on, we may get discouraged. 
 With steady grasp on the Great Shepherd, 
 let our hearts continually pray, — 
 
 ** Keep thou my feet ; I do not ask to see 
 The distant scene ; one step 's enough for me." 
 
THE EVERLASTING ARMS. 
 
 /~\NE of the sweetest passages in the 
 ^^ Bible is this one : *' Underneath are 
 the everlasting arms." It is not often 
 preached from ; perhaps because it is felt 
 to be so much richer and more touching 
 than anything we ministers can say about it. 
 But what a vivid idea it gives of the Divine 
 support! The first idea of infancy is of 
 resting in arms which maternal love never 
 allows to become weary. Sick-room ex- 
 periences confirm the impression when we 
 have seen a feeble mother or sister lifted 
 from the bed of pain by the stronger ones 
 of the household. In the case of our 
 Heavenly Father, the arms are felt, but n6t 
 seen. The invisible secret support comes 
 
78 THE EVERLASTING ARMS. 
 
 to the soul in its hours of weakness or 
 trouble ; for God knoweth our feebleness, 
 He remembereth that we are dust. 
 
 We often sink very low under the weight 
 of sorrows. Sudden disappointments can 
 carry us, in an hour, from the heights down 
 to the very depths. Props that we leaned 
 upon are stricken away. What God means 
 by it very often is just to bring us down to 
 " the everlasting arms." We did not feel 
 our need of them before. We were " mak- 
 ing flesh our arm," and relying on human 
 comforts or resources. When my little boy 
 dashes off to his play, brimful of glee, he 
 does not stop to think much about his pa- 
 rents ; but let him be taken suddenly sick, 
 ,o*r an accident befall him, his first thought 
 is to go to his mother. God often lays His 
 hand heavily upon us to remind us that 
 we have a . Father. When my neighbor 
 
 A broke in business, and twenty-four 
 
 hours made him a bankrupt, he came home, 
 saying to himself, ** Well, my money is 
 
THE EVERLASTING ARMS. 79 
 
 gone, but Jesus is left." He did not 
 merely come down to '' hard pan," he came 
 to something far more solid, — to the ever- 
 lasting arms. When another friend laid her 
 beautiful boy in his coffin, after the scarlet- 
 fever had done its worst, she laid her own 
 sorrowful heart upon the everlasting arms. 
 The dear little sleeper was there already. 
 The Shepherd had His lamb. 
 
 There is something about deep sorrow 
 that tends to wake up the ^////<3^- feeling in all 
 of us. A man of giant intellect becomes 
 like a little- child when a great grief smites 
 him, or when a grave opens beneath his 
 bedroom or his fireside. I have seen a 
 stout sailor, who laughed at the tempest, 
 come home when he was sick, and let his 
 old mother nurse him as if he were a baby. 
 He was willing to lean on the arms that had 
 never failed him. So a Christian in the 
 time of trouble is brought to this child- 
 _ feeling. He wants to lean somewhere, to 
 talk to somebody, to have somebody love 
 
8o THE EVERLASTING ARMS. 
 
 him and hold him up. His extremity be- 
 comes God's opportunity. Then his hum- 
 bled, broken spirit cries out, — 
 
 " O Lord, a little helpless child 
 
 Comes to Thee this day for rest; 
 Take me, fold me in Thy arms, 
 Hold my head upon Thy breast." 
 
 One great purpose in all affliction is to 
 bring us down to the everlasting arms. 
 What new strength and peace it gives us to 
 feel them underneath us ! We know that, 
 far as we may have sunk, we cannot go any 
 farther. Those mighty arms can not only 
 hold us, they can lift us up. They can 
 carry us along. Faith, in its essence, is 
 simply a resting on the everlasting arms. 
 It is trusting them, and not our own weak- 
 ness. The sublime act of Jesus as our Re- 
 deemer was to descend to the lowest depths 
 of human depravity and guilt, and to bring 
 up His redeemed ones from that horrible 
 pit in His loving arms. Faith is just the 
 clinging to those arms, and nothing more. 
 
THE EVERLASTING ARMS. 8 1 
 
 This first lesson in conversion is to be 
 practised and repeated all through the sub- 
 sequent Christian life. To endeavor to lift 
 our own souls by our own strength, is as 
 absurd as to attempt to lift our bodies by- 
 grasping hold of our own clothes. The 
 lift must come from God. Faith cries out, 
 " O my Lord, Thou hast a mighty arm ; 
 hold me up." The response from heaven 
 is, " I have found thee ; Mine arm shall 
 strengthen thee; on My arm shalt thou 
 trust." 
 
 Here lies the very core of the doctrine of 
 '' Assurance." It simply means that I can 
 feel, and every Christian believer can feel 
 perfectly sure that the everlasting arms will 
 never break and never fail us. I am not 
 so sure that in some moment of wayward- 
 ness, or pride, or self-sufficiency, I may not 
 forsake those arms, and trust to my own 
 wretched weakness. Then the curse which 
 God has pronounced on those who depart 
 from Him and ''make flesh their arm" 
 
 6 
 
82 THE EVERLASTING ARMS. 
 
 is certain to come upon me. I learn from 
 bitter experience what a pitiable object 
 even a Christian can be when he has for- 
 saken the Living Fountain, and has nothing 
 left but his own broken cistern. God's 
 Word is full of precious encouragement 
 to faith, but it contains terrible warnings 
 against presumption and self-confidence. 
 And while Presumption is swinging on its 
 spider's web over the perilous precipice, 
 Faith calmly says, — 
 
 " All my trust on Thee is stayed, 
 All my help from Thee I bring." 
 
 While Unbelief is floundering through 
 the darkness, or sinking in the waves of 
 despair. Faith triumphantly sings, — 
 
 " Safe in the arms of Jesus, 
 Safe on His gentle breast, 
 Here, by His love o'ershadowed, 
 Sweetly my soul doth rest." 
 
 This is the theology for times of tempta- 
 tion. Such times are sure to come. They 
 
THE EVERLASTING ARMS. 83 
 
 are the testing processes. A late Sunday's 
 equinoctial gale tested every tree in tlie 
 forest; only the rotten ones came down. 
 When we read or hear how some professed 
 Christian has turned defaulter, or lapsed 
 into drunkenness, or slipped from the com- 
 munion-table into open disgrace, it simply 
 means that a human arm has broken. The 
 man had forsaken the everlasting arms. 
 David did it once, and fell. Daniel did not 
 do it, and he stood. " The Lord knoweth 
 how to deliver the godly out of tempta- 
 tions." 
 
 This is a precious theology, this theol- 
 ogy of trust, for the sick-room. We called 
 in this week to visit one of Christ's suffer- 
 ing flock. We talked for a time about the 
 ordinary consolations for such cases as 
 hers. Presently we said, '' There is a sweet 
 text that has been running in our mind for 
 days past : it is this, ' Underneath are the 
 everlasting arms.' " The tears came in a 
 moment; that precious passage went to 
 
84 
 
 THE EVERLASTING ARMS. 
 
 the right spot; it did good like a medi- 
 cine ; and our suffering friend lay more 
 comfortable on that bed of pain from feel- 
 ing that underneath her were the everlast- 
 ing arms. Reader, may they be under thy 
 head in the dying hour ! 
 
 ^^^©••i^ 
 
WORDS FOR THE WEARY. 
 
 /^PENING into one of those rich chap- 
 ^^ ters of Isaiah, that are as full of nour- 
 ishment as a wheat-field, our eye lighted 
 upon this passage : *' The Lord God hath 
 given me the tongue of the learned, that I 
 should know how to speak a word in season 
 to him that is weary." This set us to think- 
 ing about the restfiilness of God's Word 
 and of Christ's supporting grace. A very 
 different thing is this from dreamy indo- 
 lence. God abhors the idle man as a 
 monster, and laziness as a cardinal sin. 
 But rest is not only refreshing, but invigo- 
 rating. The farmer's noonday hour under 
 the shady tree refits him for the hot after- 
 noon's toil in the harvest-field. Nothing 
 
86 WORDS FOR THE WEARY, 
 
 fits an army for battle like a good night's 
 sleep and a full morning meal. If some 
 ** terrible toilers " would oftener halt and 
 rest, they would live the longer. 
 
 All around us are multitudes of weary 
 people. They are tired out with life's daily 
 battle, with bearing the heat and burden of 
 the day. Some carry a great load of care 
 as to how they shall make both ends meet, 
 and how they shall " foot " the bills for 
 rent, food, and raiment. Others are worn 
 out with anxieties. A burden of spiritual 
 despondency weighs down ** Brother Little- 
 Faith " and '' Mrs. Much-Afraid." Another 
 one has grown tired of waiting for success 
 in his labors, and is tempted to throw down 
 his seed-bag and sickle in sheer despair. 
 Others still are weary of waiting for recog- 
 nized answers to prayer. 
 
 For all these tired and burdened hearts 
 Jesus, the rehef-bringer, has His word in 
 season. To the Christian with a small 
 purse He says : ** Your life consisteth not 
 
WORDS FOR THE WEARY. 8/ 
 
 in the abundance of things ye possess. I 
 counsel thee to buy of Me gold tried in the 
 fire, that thou mayest be rich. At My right 
 hand are treasures for evermore." Only 
 think how rich a man is who has a clean 
 conscience here and heaven hereafter ! To 
 the doubting and desponding Jesus says : 
 " Fear not, little flock ; for it is my Father's 
 good pleasure to give you the kingdom." 
 There is a wonderful restfulness for worried 
 hearts in this single assurance, " Lo, I am 
 with you alway." This may be called 
 Christ's richest and sweetest promise. The 
 believer who lives on that promise can often 
 sing, — 
 
 " I am never lonely 
 
 While Jesus standeth by ; 
 His presence always cheers me, 
 I know that He is nigh. 
 
 " Friendless ? No, not friendless, 
 For Jesus is my friend ; 
 I change, but He remaineth 
 A Brother to the end. 
 
88 WORDS FOR THE WEARY. 
 
 " Tired ? No, not tired ; 
 
 While leaning on His breast, 
 My soul hath full enjoyment 
 Of His eternal rest." 
 
 The most common cause of weariness is 
 the attempt to carry an overload of care. 
 And this is not a wise forethought for the 
 future or a proper providence for Hfe's 
 " rainy day." It is sheer worry. The word 
 in season for such overloaded Christians, 
 who toil along life's highway like jaded 
 pack-horses, is this : " Cast thy burden on 
 the Lord, and He shall sustain thee." If 
 we will only drop everything that is sinful 
 and superfluous in the shape of worry. He 
 will enable us to carry the legitimate load. 
 One more word for the weary is, *' Cast 
 your care on Him, for He careth for you." 
 The literal meaning of this tonic text is : 
 He has you on His heart. What an in- 
 spiring, gladdening thought ! The infinite 
 God from His everlasting throne has poor 
 little sinful me on His divine heart! My 
 
WORDS FOR THE WEARY. 89 
 
 big load is not a feather to Him. He knows 
 my frame ; He remembers that I am dust. 
 Like as a father pitieth his children, so 
 the Lord pitieth us poor weaklings. He 
 says to us, *' Give me your burdens." He 
 who piloted Noah and all the precious 
 freight in the ark, who supplied the widow's 
 waning cruse of oil, who put Peter to 
 sleep in the dungeon and calmed Paul 
 in the roaring tempest, — He says to me, 
 '' Roll your anxieties over on Me. I have 
 you on My heart." What fools we are when 
 we strap the load more tightly, and deter- 
 mine that nobody shall carry it but our- 
 selves ! 
 
 Suppose that a weary, footsore traveller 
 were trudging along an up-hill road on a 
 sultry day, and a wagon overtakes him. 
 The kind driver calls out: *' Ho ! my 
 friend, you look tired. Throw that pack 
 into my wagon ; I am going your way." 
 But the silly wayfarer, eying him suspi- 
 ciously, as if he wished to steal it, churl- 
 
90 WORDS FOR THE WEARY. 
 
 ishly replies, " Go along with you. I can 
 carry my own luggage." We laugh at 
 this obstinate folly, and then repeat the 
 same insane sin against the God of love. 
 
 When God says to us, " Give Me your 
 load, and I will help you," He does not re- 
 lease us from our share of duty. No more 
 does the atoning Saviour when He bears 
 the guilt ^nd penalty of our sins, release us 
 from repentance of those sins or from obey- 
 ing His commandments. God's offer is to 
 lighten our loads by putting His grace into 
 our hearts and underneath the load. He 
 then becomes our strength. His all-suffi- 
 cient grace is made perfect in our weakness, 
 so that God really carries the load. It was 
 the Christ m Paul who defied Nero and 
 conquered the devil. 
 
 This divine doctrine of trust is a won- 
 derfully restful one to weary disciple^. It 
 takes the tire out of the heart. As the 
 infant drops over on mother's bosom into 
 soft repose, so Faith rests its weary head on 
 
WORDS FOR THE WEARY. 91 
 
 Jesus. He giveth His beloved sleep, so 
 that they may wake up refreshed for their 
 appointed work. 
 
 It is not honest work that really wears 
 any Christian out. It is the ague-fit of 
 worry that consumes strength and furrows 
 the cheek and brings on decrepitude. That 
 giant of Jesus Christ who drew the Gospel 
 chariot from Jerusalem to Rome, and had 
 the care of all the churches on his great 
 heart, never complained of being tired. 
 The secret was that he never chafed his 
 powers with a moment's worry. He was 
 doing God's work, and he left God to be 
 responsible for results. He knew whom he 
 believed, and felt perfectly sure that all 
 things work together for good to them who 
 love the Lord Jesus. 
 
 Just a word, in closing, to those who are 
 getting tired of a life of sin and of serving 
 Satan. Friends, you are serving a hard 
 master. His wages are death. Again and 
 again you have become disgusted with 
 
92 WOI^DS FOR THE WEARY. 
 
 yourselves as leading a frivolous, foolish 
 life for an immortal being. All the pleas- 
 ures you have ever paid so dearly for, all 
 the accumulations you have earned, do not 
 satisfy you. There is a hungry, aching 
 spot in your soul. There comes many a 
 moment in which you wish you had some- 
 thing solider, sweeter, stronger, something 
 to live for and to die by. You need Jesus 
 Christ ! Wherefore do ye spend your labor 
 for that which satisfieth not? Open your 
 weary ear to that voice of His love : " Come 
 unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy 
 laden, and I will give you rest." Learn of 
 Him; live for Him; labor for Him. Life 
 will glow with a new charm ; your soul 
 will then mount as with an eagle's wing; 
 you will run, and never weary, you will 
 walk with Jesus, and never faint. 
 
THE LORD REIGNETH. 
 
 TT 7HAT a magnificent outburst of loy- 
 ^ ' alty opens the ninety-third psalm ! 
 **The Lord reigneth, He is clothed with 
 majesty; the Lord is clothed with strength, 
 wherewith He hath girded Himself. Thy 
 throne is established of old : Thou art 
 from everlasting." Here we have the 
 empire of love, the royal robe, the girdle 
 of omnipotence, and the immovable throne. 
 The psalmist would seem to have been 
 thinking of the problems of life, its dark 
 things and its mysteries. So many things 
 seemed irreconcilable with the Divine 
 goodness that he admits that " clouds and 
 darkness are round about Him." But this 
 truth flashes out through the clouds, — the 
 
94 THE LORD REIGN ETH. 
 
 Lord reigns. That is enough. He does 
 not try to pry into the council-chamber. 
 He cannot get behind the cloud. But love 
 reigns there, and justice and righteousness 
 are the foundations of that throne. 
 
 Not one of us has any trouble in accept- 
 ing this doctrine of God's sovereignty as 
 long as things go to our liking. We are 
 perfectly satisfied to let God have His way 
 as long as He does not cross us. We all 
 believe in His administration, and are 
 ready (as Dr. Finney used to say) to 
 ''vote God in as our governor "'as long as 
 business thrives and crops are plentiful 
 and every one around our own table is 
 hearty and happy. As long as His mer- 
 cies are poured out in wine, we drink of 
 them gladly ; but as soon as the same cup 
 begins to taste of wormwood, we push it 
 away in disgust, or cry out piteously, 
 " Let this cup pass from me." Any other 
 cup we could have swallowed, but not this 
 one. If God had only tried us with the 
 
THE LORD REIGNETH. 95 
 
 loss of our property and spared us our 
 health, we could have borne it; or if He 
 had sent the sickness at some other time, 
 we would not murmur so; or if His blow 
 had struck us somewhere else but in our 
 very tenderest spot, we should not cry out 
 so bitterly. In short, if God had only con- 
 sulted us as to the medicine we should 
 take and as to the branch His pruning- 
 knife should lop off, we would have been 
 perfectly submissive. Every pastor en- 
 counters this kind of faith in God's sover- 
 eignty wherever he goes. If the Lord 
 governed so as to please everybody, there 
 would not be a rebel in all His universe. 
 
 As some of our readers may just now be 
 smarting under God's strokes of discipline 
 or letting their hearts fester into rebellion, 
 let us whisper a few truths into their ears. 
 The first is that our Heavenly Father 
 never afflicts one of His children but for a 
 wise purpose. He never strikes at random 
 or deals one blow in cruelty. Sometimes 
 
96 THE LORD REIGNETH. 
 
 His chastisements are punitive. Christians 
 deserve punishment as truly as ungodly 
 blasphemers do when they violate God's 
 laws. A lazy Christian will come to want 
 as soon as a lazy profligate. If as holy a 
 man as Dr. Payson breaks some of God's 
 sanitary regulations by overworking his 
 nervous system and allowing himself no 
 recreations, he must expect shattered 
 nerves and early paralysis. One of the 
 excellences of God's government is that 
 He never alters His laws to suit special 
 cases. They are unchangeable. And I 
 have heard of a great many "■ mysterious 
 providences " that had in them no mys- 
 tery at all. They were simply righteous 
 retributions. There is no mystery when a 
 bad manager, even though he be a Chris- 
 tian, fails in business, or when a Christian 
 merchant that has robbed himself of indis- 
 pensable rest is stricken with softening of 
 the brain. A thousand so-called ''provi- 
 dences" might have been prevented by 
 
THE LORD REIGNETH. 97 
 
 the exercise of a little common sense and 
 conscience. If we break God's command- 
 ments, we must pay the penalty. 
 
 Sometimes our Sovereign sends afflic- 
 tions that are preventive. They save us 
 from something worse. As the headache 
 and the self-loathing that follow a first 
 bottle are intended to warn us against 
 touching another, so God often puts a 
 chastisement at the entrance to a path of 
 danger. There is even a conserving influ- 
 ence in some severe trials, just as the early 
 snows that are now falling on our northern 
 hills will conserve the winter wheat. I can 
 recall more than one chilling providence 
 which came in time to keep me from losing 
 what I could not afford to spare. 
 
 Still other afflictions are sent to pitrify 
 character. God sits as a refiner beside 
 His furnace. He heats it until the metal 
 melts and the dross runs away. He keep- 
 eth His silver in the furnace until He can 
 see His own face reflected in the clear 
 
 7 
 
98 THE LORD REIGNETH. 
 
 metal of the heart as in a mirror. Then 
 the affliction has done its work. God has 
 made the vessel *' unto His own honor." 
 There is such a wretched amount of self- 
 will and pride and covetousness and un- 
 belief even in undoubted Christians, that 
 they require the fining-pot very often. 
 Many a man and woman has been the 
 worse for want of this kind of discipline. 
 
 It is a wholesome process to be " taken 
 down " occasionally. The grass in every 
 lawn requires to be taken down by a 
 mower. The oftener it is mowed the 
 richer and the thicker is the growth. The 
 lawn never looks so beautiful as after the 
 keen-edged cutter has gone over it. I 
 have observed that some Christians in my 
 charge have neve-r appeared so attractive 
 in their humility and heavenly-mindedness 
 as when God's mowing-machine has been 
 passed over them. The great Apostle's 
 career, as I read it in the masterly consec- 
 utive narrative of Canon Farrar, showed in 
 
THE LORD REIGNETH. 99 
 
 almost every page the effects of the scythe. 
 There was prodigious growth from the 
 roots. Yet no man exalted God's sover- 
 eignty more heartily than Paul. He gloried 
 even in the tribulations which God per- 
 mitted him to suffer, knowing that trib- 
 ulation worketh patience, and patience 
 experience, and experience hope. This too 
 he knew, that in all this process the love 
 of God was shed abroad in his heart by the 
 Holy Ghost given unto him. 
 
 We have discussed in this short paper 
 just one aspect of God's government, 
 namely, His personal rule of our own per- 
 sonal lives and lot. His sovereignty on the 
 grander scale of the natural world and of 
 His vast spiritual kingdom we leave out of 
 sight. It is a blessed thought that the 
 Lord reigneth over little short-lived me as 
 truly as over the whole Church or the 
 whole universe. He numbereth the hairs 
 of my head, and ordereth my steps. Let it 
 be my daily and devoutest aim to lay the 
 
lOO THE LORD REIGN ETH. 
 
 plan of my life on God's plan. If His im- 
 movable laws push me back and hedge me 
 in from sin, then all the better. If His 
 sharp knife prunes me, then I am only the 
 more sure that He loves me. Afflictions 
 are like the cactus plant of His making, very 
 unsightly and full of thorns, but they bear 
 marvellous flowers in their time. God's 
 government is the solidest ground of my 
 confidence and joy. It underlies all my 
 theology, and is the very rock-bed on 
 which I rest my salvation. While Jeho- 
 vah reigns let me rejoice to obey Him. 
 To oppose Hirn is to invite His retribu- 
 tions, and that means — Hell ! To submit 
 to Him is to win His favor and to secure 
 His love, and that means — Heaven ! The 
 nearer we get to the throne the more 
 loudly shall we sing, **The Lord God om- 
 nipotent reigneth ! " ^ 
 
UP TO THE HILLS. 
 
 'T^HE one hundred and twenty-first psalm 
 -*- is one of the most soul-inspiring in 
 the whole psalter. It is named " a song of 
 degrees," that is, a song of ascents, leading 
 from the lower up to the higher. Whether 
 this was originally intended as a musical 
 expression or as a description of the ascent 
 to the sacred mount in Jerusalem, it happily 
 describes the spiritual idea of the psalm. 
 The key-note is in the first verse. '' I will 
 lift up mine eyes unto the hills [or moun- 
 tains] from whence cometh my help. My 
 help is from the Lord, which made heaven 
 and earth." The grand idea is that we 
 must look higher if we would live higher. 
 
102 UP TO THE HILLS, 
 
 We must have help from heaven if we 
 would reach heaven. 
 
 In things material and in things spiritual 
 not one of us is created to entire indepen- 
 dence. From infancy, when we depend on 
 a mother's milk for nourishment, and child- 
 hood, when we depend on our teachers 
 for instruction, clear through the activities 
 of manhood, which require the aid of cus- 
 tomers and clients in order to prosper, we 
 cannot ever live a year in and by ourselves. 
 Still more true is it that our moral life is 
 one of weakness and of want. The impor- 
 tant question is: Where shall we find the 
 supplies for the soul's wants and the help 
 for the soul's weakness? And the fatal 
 mistake so often made is that the soul does 
 not look high enough to secure substantial 
 help and to insure a complete victory. For 
 example, we are exposed to perpetual 
 temptations, which draw us toward sin and 
 thus tend to drag us downward. How are 
 we to meet them ? 
 
UP TO THE HILLS. I03 
 
 We may employ arguments that are 
 wholly of the earth, earthy. They have no 
 motives that are not essentially selfish ; 
 they do not recognize anything higher than 
 self-interest, or appeal to any supernatu- 
 ral power for aid. Here is a young man 
 of ardent temperament, who is strongly 
 tempted to sensual indulgence. He may 
 say to himself: '' This will not pay for the 
 risks. I shall injure my health; I shall 
 stain the reputation of another; I may be 
 discovered and disgraced." Assuredly the 
 young Hebrew who was put to the strain 
 of a tremendous temptation in the house of 
 Potiphar laid hold of vastly higher motives 
 than these. He lifted his eyes to the hills 
 and made his appeal to God. *' How can 
 I do this great wickedness," he cries out, 
 "and sin against God?" That appeal 
 lashed him, as it were, to the everlasting 
 throne, and divine grace made him tempta- 
 tion-proof. 
 
 Here is the only safeguard under the 
 
104 ^P T'O THE HILLS. 
 
 pressure of assaults against conscience or 
 of powerful enticements to some sinful self- 
 gratification. The young man who is too 
 fond of the champagne-glass needs some- 
 thing more than the conviction that the 
 bottle is endangering his health and his 
 pocket, in order to keep him abstinent. He 
 must recognize sin, as well as sorrow, in 
 the sting which the " viper in the glass " 
 inflicts, and seek his help from the High- 
 est. That is no trustworthy honesty which 
 spurns the enticement to fraud simply be- 
 cause detection may bring disgrace, because 
 the man may persuade himself that in his 
 circumstances detection is impossible. He 
 is only safe when he looks up from these 
 paltry motives, — up high enough to see 
 God. In these days, when the press teems 
 with obituaries of lost characters, it ought to 
 be known that the only principle which can 
 hold a merchant, or a cashier, or an ac- 
 countant, is a Bible-conscience, which draws 
 its strength from the everlasting hills of 
 Right. 
 
UP TO THE HILLS. 105 
 
 There are some of us who have known 
 what it is to drink bitter draughts of afflic- 
 tion, and to have the four corners of our 
 house smitten by a terrible sorrow. At 
 such times, how hollow and worthless were 
 many of the stereotyped prescriptions for 
 comfort ! ** Time must do its work," was 
 one of them. As if time could bring back 
 the dead, or cruelly eradicate the beloved 
 image from the memory ! " Travel," is an- 
 other of these quack recommendations for 
 a wounded spirit. Just as if God had ever 
 made an Atlantic wide enough to carry us 
 out of the reach of heart-breaking misery ! 
 Wretched comforters are they all. The 
 suffering heart heeds not the voice of such 
 charmers, charm they never so wisely. 
 Never, never have I been able to gain one 
 ray of genuine consolation until I lifted my 
 eyes unto the hills from whence cometh 
 the Almighty help. As soon as I have 
 begun to taste of God's exceeding great and 
 precious promises my strength has begun 
 
I06 UP TO THE HILLS. 
 
 to revive. As soon as His everlasting arm 
 got hold around me the burden grew lighter, 
 — yea, it carried me and the load likewise. 
 God opened to me paths of usefulness 
 which were in the line of His service, and 
 also of blessings to my fellow-men. And so 
 help flowed down to me from the hills like 
 the streams that make music from the 
 precipices to one who climbs the VVenzern 
 Alp. 
 
 This sublime passage from the hundred 
 and twenty-first psalm throws its sugges- 
 tive side-light on the question why many 
 of my readers have never. obtained a solid 
 and satisfactory religious hope. You will 
 admit in your honest hours that you are 
 not what you ought to be, nor what you 
 yet intend to be. You admit that you 
 are sinners. You have no expectation of 
 being lost to all eternity. Certain steps 
 you have taken in past times, but they all 
 left you as low down as you started. Both 
 your motives and your methods were 
 
UP TO THE HILLS. . 10/ 
 
 pitched too low. All attempts at self-salva- 
 tion were as futile as would be the attempt 
 to lift yourself by grasping hold of your 
 own shoes. Even religious services failed 
 to bring you any substantial change of 
 heart and character, because you did not 
 get your eye or thought above them. The 
 best sermon ever preached is only a cup 
 after all. It may bring the water, but the 
 cup itself cannot quench thirst. 
 
 What you need is to lift your eyes above 
 your sinful, needy self, above your church- 
 goings and other religious observances, 
 above every one and everything, to the 
 only mountain whence cometh your help. 
 That mountain is Calvary. The crucified 
 and now living Son of God is the object on 
 which you must fix your eye. As a living 
 man, you need a living Christ. You want 
 not a system of doctrine, but a personal 
 Saviour. You need some one not only to 
 lay your hand upon, but one who can 
 return the grasp of that hand. The lift 
 
I08 UP TO THE HILLS. 
 
 must come from Him. The new life must 
 come from Him. *' His blood cleanseth 
 from all sin " is a mere abstract truth 
 until you come up to that atoning blood 
 for yourself Submit to its cleansing, as 
 Naaman submitted to be washed in Jordan. 
 "A living trust in Jesus has power unto 
 salvation only because it is the means by 
 which the saving power of God may come 
 into your heart." Faith is not a mere in- 
 tellectual opinion. It is a heart transaction, 
 by which you lay hold on Jesus and Jesus 
 saves. His sacrifice for sin avails for you ; 
 His strength becomes yours ; His example 
 teaches you how to live your own daily 
 life ; His Spirit comes to dwell within you ; 
 His armor protects you ; and His service 
 becomes the inspiration of your whole 
 being. When you ascend into Christ you 
 reach a loftier, purer atmosphere. Security 
 is gained up there as in a stronghold on a 
 cliff. Six times over in this psalm the in- 
 spired penman tells us how the Lord is thy 
 
UP TO THE HILLS. JOQ 
 
 keeper, and how He shall preserve thy soul 
 to all eternity. My friend, lift your eyes 
 upward. Let your voice go up in fervent 
 prayer to the everlasting hills. Put your 
 feet firmly on the path that leads straight 
 toward God. When you reach Him in this 
 world you have reached heaven in the 
 next world. 
 
RIGHT SEEING. 
 
 •' nPHOU hast well seen." These were 
 "*■ God's words to Jeremiah when He 
 called him to his life-work as a " seer " or 
 prophet to the people of Israel. He puts 
 to the modest, self-distrustful young man 
 the question, ''What seest thou?" Jere- 
 miah repHes, '* I see a rod of an almond 
 tree." This is just what the Lord meant 
 that he should see ; the almond was a tree 
 of rapid growth and early bloom ; it typi- 
 fied speedy action. As the young Jew had 
 shown his capacity for right discernment, 
 the Lord commended his wise answer, and 
 said to him, " Thou hast well seen." 
 
 There is a right way and a wrong way 
 of looking at almost everything. To a 
 
RIGHT SEEING. 1 1 1 
 
 man who has no eye for beauty one of 
 Claude's landscapes is merely so much 
 paint and linen canvas ; to another it is a 
 masterpiece of golden sunlight bathing 
 field and forest with its glory. To many 
 it was predicted that Christ, the Messiah, 
 would be as " a root out of dry ground, 
 having no form or comeliness. When they 
 shall see Him, there is no beauty that they 
 should desire Him; He will be despised 
 and rejected of men." When He came, 
 therefore, to His own, they received Him 
 not. As many as beheld Him rightly and 
 received Him, to them gave He the privi- 
 lege of becoming the children of God. He 
 is to them the chief among ten thousand, 
 and the altogether lovely. Christ never 
 changes. The difference between the 
 thoughtless sinner and the same person 
 after he is converted, is, that he looks at 
 Him with a new eye, and sees Him to be 
 the very Saviour that he needs. 
 
 Some people look at God only as a con- 
 
112 RIGHT SEEING. 
 
 suming fire, and are struck with despair. 
 Others go to the opposite extreme, and 
 see in Him nothing but pity and pardon- 
 ing mercy; they easily sHde off into Uni- 
 versahsm. But the man who magnifies 
 God's mercy at the expense of His justice, 
 and who does not beheve that He will pun- 
 ish sin as it deserves, has not " well seen." 
 He will be cured of his delusion on the 
 Day of Judgment. Those wise men at 
 Westminster saw the Divine Being, our 
 Heavenly Father, in the right proportions 
 of His attributes when they framed that 
 wonderful answer to that question in the 
 Catechism, "What is God?" 
 
 In nothing are we all apt. to make more 
 terrible blunders than in looking at God's 
 providential dealings. Even some Chris- 
 tians have a heathenish habit of talking 
 about "good luck" and "windfalls" and 
 " bad fortune," and other expressions that 
 convey the idea that this life is a mere 
 game of chance. Blind unbehef may be 
 
RIGHT SEEING. 1 1 3 
 
 expected to err, and to scan God's work 
 as either a riddle or a muddle. A Chris- 
 tian, who has had his eyes opened, ought to 
 know better. Yet how often do we all re- 
 gard God's dealings in a wrong light, and 
 call them by the wrong name ! We fre- 
 quently speak of certain things as afflic- 
 tions when they are really blessings in 
 disguise. We congratulate people on gain- 
 ing what turns out to be a terrible snare, 
 or a worse than loss. Quite as often we 
 condole with them over a lot which is 
 about to yield to them mercies more pre- 
 cious than gold. Old Jacob probably 
 thought that he was a fair subject for com- 
 miseration on that evening when he sat 
 moaning in his tent-door ; but the caravan 
 was just approaching which brought him 
 Simeon and Benjamin, and glorious tid- 
 ings about the long-lost Joseph. He had 
 not well seen what sort of a God he was 
 serving. 
 
 Let us hesitate before we condole with a 
 8 
 
114 RIGHT SEEING. 
 
 brother who is under the chastisement of our 
 loving Father in Heaven. Be careful how 
 you condole with a man who has lost his 
 money and saved his good name, or con- 
 gratulate the man who has made a milHon 
 at the expense of his piety. When a Chris- 
 tian is toppled over from a dizzy and dan- 
 gerous height, and "brought down to hard 
 pan," he is brought down to the solid rock 
 at the same time. In the valley of humiu- 
 ation he has more of the joy of God's 
 countenance, and wears more of the herb 
 called '' heart's-ease " in his bosom, than he 
 ever did in the days of his giddy prosper- 
 ity. Sickness has often brought to a man 
 spiritual recovery ; suffering has often 
 wrought out for him an exceeding weight 
 of glory. The writer of this paragraph 
 has lately been led through a very shad- 
 owy pathway of trial ; but it has never 
 been so dark that he could not see to read 
 some precious promises that glowed like 
 diamonds. The adversary tries hard to 
 
RIGHT . SEEING. 1 1 5 
 
 break our lamp, and to steal our diamonds 
 in those dark passage-ways of trial. We 
 need good eyesight in such times of trouble, 
 so as not to stumble, or to lose sight of the 
 Comforter, or of the bright light which 
 shines at the end of the way. 
 
 I have seen people condole tenderly 
 with a weeping mother whose child has 
 flown away home to heaven ; but they 
 never thought of condoling with her over 
 a living child who was a frivolous slave 
 of fashion, or a dissipated sensualist, or a 
 wayward son, the " heaviness of his mother." 
 A hundred times over have I pitied more 
 the parent of a living sorrow than the par- 
 ent of a departed joy. Spare your tears 
 from the darlings who are safe in the arms 
 of Jesus, and spend them over the living 
 who are yet dead in sin and sheer impeni- 
 tence. Let us learn to see things rightly, 
 and call them by their right names. We 
 too often drape our real blessings with a 
 pall, and decorate our dangerous tempta- 
 
Il6 • RIGHT SEEING, 
 
 tions with garlands. The sharpest trials 
 this nation ever knew have turned into 
 tender mercies. Garfield in his grave has 
 done more for us than Garfield could have 
 done in the presidential chair. Satan out- 
 witted himself when he armed one of his 
 imps to be an assassin. 
 
 Let us all pray fervently for spiritual 
 discernment. Lord, open Thou our eyes ! 
 Then we shall see this world to be a mere 
 training-school for a better world ; we shall 
 see a Father's smile behind the darkest 
 cloud ; we shall see in duty done our highest 
 delight ; and at the end of the conflict we 
 shall see the King in His beauty ^ and know 
 Him even as we are known. 
 
THE LORD OUR STRENGTH. 
 
 'THHE first lesson of childhood is human 
 -^ weakness. The earliest cry of the in- 
 fant betrays it. At the other end of life we 
 often see a pitiable dotage, such as I en- 
 countered lately in the case of a man who 
 was once a luminary of the American pul- 
 pit, but now cannot remember the names 
 of his own children. But the weakest side 
 of humanity is its moral side. Colossal 
 intellect is often found lodged in the same 
 person with a conscience of mere pulp. 
 For the sake of morality, I rejoice that 
 Madame de Remusat and Metternich have 
 lately been stripping away the glamour that 
 has hung around that stupendous embodi- 
 ment of selfishness, Napoleon I. They 
 
Il8 THE LORD OUR STRENGTH, 
 
 show US the intellectual giant continually 
 pushed over with a straw. The chief les- 
 son of such a career as Napoleon's is to 
 demonstrate what a contemptible creature 
 man is the moment he cuts loose from 
 God. 
 
 One of the chief purposes of our divine 
 religion is to teach man where to find this 
 indispensable element of strength. The 
 Divine Word, coming from the very Maker 
 of man, who knows us completely, de- 
 clares that " he who trusteth in his own 
 heart is a fool." We have no spiritual 
 strength in ourselves. Just as our bodies 
 derive all their strength from the food we 
 eat, and every oak draws its strength from 
 the surrounding earth and air, so our souls 
 obtain all spiritual power from a source 
 outside of us. Psalmist David, whose na- 
 tive weaknesses were deplorably conspicu- 
 ous, was only strong when in alliance with 
 God. His declaration is, *'The Lord is my 
 strength." This is the only strength which 
 
THE LORD OUR STRENGTH, 1 19 
 
 the Bible recognizes. Who are the Bible 
 heroes? Men of genius, wits, orators, 
 philosophers? No. They are the Enoch 
 who walked with God, the Joseph who 
 conquered sensual temptation because God 
 was with him, the Elijah who stood like a 
 granite pillar against the tides of idolatry, 
 and the Daniel who never quailed at the 
 lion's roar. Daniel gives us the secret of 
 his strength in his three-times-a-day inter- 
 views with God. The Lord fed his inner 
 soul as the subterranean springs feed a well 
 and keep it full during summer droughts. 
 
 God's strength is " made perfect in our 
 weakness." This means that the divine 
 power is most conspicuous when our weak- 
 ness is the most thoroughly felt. We have 
 got first to be emptied of all self-conceit 
 and self-confidence. A bucket cannot hold 
 air and water at the same time. As the 
 water comes in the air must go out. The 
 meaning of some hard trials is to get the 
 accursed spirit of self out of our hearts. 
 
I20 THE LORD OUR STRENGTH. 
 
 When we have been emptied of self-trust, 
 we are in the condition to be filled with 
 might in the inner man by the power of 
 the Holy Spirit. When Isaiah felt that 
 he was but a child, and an unclean one at 
 that, he received the touch of celestial 
 fire. Peter had immense confidence in 
 Peter when he boasted of his own strength ; 
 but after pride had got its fall, Peter is 
 endued with power from on high, and 
 then the apostle who was frightened by a 
 servant-girl could face a Sanhedrim. A 
 Christian must not only realize his own 
 utter feebleness, but he must give up 
 what worldlings rely on, and admit that 
 ** vain is the help of man." 
 
 That poor woman who had tried all the 
 doctors in her neighborhood, and had 
 only grown worse in body and poorer in 
 purse, is a touching illustration of our in- 
 valid souls. She despaired of human help, 
 and came crouching to the feet of the 
 Son of God. One touch of His garments 
 
THE LORD OUR STRENGTH. 121 
 
 sent a new tide of health througn her 
 veins. Contact with Christ brings cur- 
 rents of the divine power into our souls, so 
 that we can do all things through Christ 
 which strengtheneth us. At the very out- 
 set of the spiritual life this divine strength 
 becomes recognized. A Gough or a Saw- 
 yer testifies that he gained his victory over 
 the bottle by the influx of a new principle 
 and a new power into his heart. The 
 essence of conversion with them was that 
 the seven devils of lust for the cup were 
 cast out, and Christ came in. This was 
 a supernatural work, the very thing that 
 modern scepticism hoots at; but a Bible 
 which did not bring a supernatural ele- 
 ment into weak and wicked humanity 
 would not be worth the paper on which it 
 is printed. If the Christ of Christianity 
 cannot and does not endow a frail sinner 
 with supernatural power to resist terrible 
 temptations, then is Christianity a confessed 
 imposture and delusion. But it does stand 
 
122 THE LORD OUR STRENGTH. 
 
 this very crucial test. Multitudes have 
 given the triumphant testimony that, under 
 sore pressure, the Lord stood with them and 
 strengthened them. Their testimony has 
 always been, " When I am weak, then am I 
 strong," — that is, when I get emptied of 
 self-trust Jesus comes in and strengthens 
 me. Charles G. Finney has left us some 
 wonderful experiences of the prodigious 
 tides of power which poured into his soul 
 and into his work when he humbled him- 
 self before God and put his own soul, like 
 an empty vessel, under the divine power, 
 until he became filled " unto all the fulness 
 of God." 
 
 This is the real office of faith. It is sim- 
 ply the linking of our utter weakness to the 
 omnipotence of Christ. We furnish weak- 
 ness and He furnishes strength, and that 
 makes the partnership. The baby furnishes 
 a hungry little mouth, and the mother fur- 
 nishes the nourishing milk. The mother 
 is happy that she can give the full supply, 
 
THE LORD OUR STRENGTH. 1 23 
 
 and the rosy darling is happy as it draws 
 in the sweet contentment. Beautiful pic- 
 ture of my poor weak, hungry soul resting 
 on the bosom of the Infinite Love ! There 
 is no danger that the supply will ever give 
 out, for my Lord, my Feeder, my Supporter, 
 is constantly saying unto me, *' My grace 
 is sufficient for thee." In this way we are 
 strengthened with all might according to 
 His glorious power. A happier translation 
 of the sentence in i Colossians would be, 
 '' 2;/forced with all force." We have re- 
 tained the word ** reinforce " in the English 
 language, and it is a pity that we have 
 dropped the older word ** inforce," for it 
 describes exactly the impartation of the 
 divine strength to a believer's soul. 
 
 Alas, how easily we run dry, and how 
 constantly we need replenishment ! Yes- 
 terday's breakfast will not feed me to- 
 morrow. The Christian who tries to live 
 on the experiences of last year were as 
 insane as if he attempted to work on the 
 
124 1'HE LORD OUR STRENGTH, 
 
 food eaten a month ago. Lord, evermore 
 give us this bread ! They that wait on 
 the Lord shall renew their strength, the 
 waste shall constantly be repaired, and the 
 new emergency shall be met with a fresh 
 supply. 
 
 One great purpose in all afflictions is 
 to bring us down to the everlasting arms. 
 We had become presumptuous, and had 
 made flesh our arm. We were trying to go 
 alone, and then came a fall. Trouble, and 
 even bereavement, may be a great blessing, 
 if it sends us home to Jesus. A boy often 
 forgets that he has a home until a cut or a 
 bruise sends him crying to his mother's side 
 for the bandage or the medicine. God 
 often strikes away our props to bring us 
 down upon His mighty arms. What 
 strength and peace it gives us to feel them 
 underneath us ! Far as we may sink, we 
 cannot go farther down than those out- 
 stretched arms. There we stop, there we 
 rest ; , and the everlasting arms not only 
 
THE LORD OUR STRENGTH. 125 
 
 sustain us, but carry us along, as on eagles* 
 wings. Faith is just the clinging of my 
 weak soul to the Omnipotent Jesus; its 
 constant cry is ; — 
 
 " I am weak, but Thou art mighty : 
 Hold me with Thy powerful hand." 
 
 To that hand let me cling with all the five 
 fingers of my faith. It will never let me 
 drop until it lands me in glory. 
 
A CONSTANT SALVATION. 
 
 A CLIPPER ship crossing the Banks 
 of Newfoundland in heavy weather 
 strikes an iceberg. She settles rapidly at 
 the bow, and her captain and crew have 
 barely time to leap into the life-boat. The 
 question, " What must we do to be saved? " 
 is answered by their prompt leap into the 
 life-boat, which is an act of faith. They 
 trust their lives to it for salvation. From 
 immediate death they are saved. 
 
 But, after the ship has sunk, the crew 
 are still out in the deep and dangerous sea. 
 There is a second process necessary. In 
 order to keep out of the trough of the sea 
 and to reach the distant shore, they must 
 stick to the boat and pull lustily at the 
 
A CONSTANT SALVATION 12/ 
 
 oars. They must " work out their salva- 
 tion " now by hard rowing. But this is a 
 continued process of salvation day after 
 day until they reach the shores of Nova 
 Scotia. Never for a moment, however, 
 are they independent of the life-boat. That 
 must keep them afloat, or they go to the 
 bottom. At last, after hard rowing, they 
 reach the welcome shore. This is their 
 third, final, and complete salvation, for 
 they are entirely beyond any perils of the 
 treacherous sea. Now they are at rest, for 
 they have reached the desired haven. 
 
 This homely parable will illustrate with 
 sufficient clearness the three ways in which 
 the word salvation is employed in God's 
 Word and in human experience. The first 
 leap into the life-boat illustrates that deci- 
 sive act of the soul in quitting all other 
 worthless reliances and throwing itself on 
 Christ Jesus in simple, believing trust. 
 This is conversion. By it the soul is deliv- 
 ered from the guilt and condemnation of 
 sin. 
 
128 A CONSTANT SALVATION. 
 
 • The Holy Spirit is active in this step, 
 cleansing and renewing the heart. By this 
 act of surrender to Christ the sinner es- 
 capes from death into life. He may joy- 
 fully cry out, " By the grace of God I am 
 saved ! " 
 
 Yet this converted believer is no more 
 independent of Christ as a Saviour than 
 those sailors were of that life-boat; for 
 until he reaches the consummated deliver- 
 ance of heaven (which is what the word 
 ** salvation" signifies in Psalm xci. i6) 
 he must be clinging to Christ Jesus ev- 
 ery day. And it is this daily and hourly 
 salvation that we wish to emphasize at 
 present. Too many people limit the word 
 to the initial step of converting faith, and 
 falsely conclude that nothing more is to be 
 done. A certain school of rather mystical 
 wfehristians so magnify this act of receiv- 
 ing the " gift of etei '^ life " in Christ that 
 they quite forget the fact that a vast deal of 
 head winds, hard rowing, conflict with the 
 
A CONSTANT SALVATION. 1 29 
 
 devil and remaining lusts must be encoun- 
 tered. 
 
 There is a very important sense in which 
 every true servant of Christ is obliged to 
 " work out his salvation " every day of his 
 life, if he lives a century. It was not to 
 impenitent sinners or to anxious inquirers 
 that Paul addressed the famous injunction, 
 " Work out your own salvation with fear and 
 trembling ; " he was addressing the blood- 
 bought church at Philippi. And if he 
 were alive to-day he might well ring these 
 solemn words into the ears of every Chris- 
 tian in the land. For if our original deliv- 
 erance from the condemnation of sin and 
 from the desert of hell depended on our 
 surrender to Christ, so our constant salva- 
 tion from the assaults of sin depends upon 
 our constant clinging to the Saviour and our 
 constant obedience to His commandments. 
 Faith without works is dead. Brethren, we 
 may be in the life-boat, but the life-boat is 
 not heaven. There is many a hard tug at the 
 
 9 
 
130 A CONSTANT SALVATION. 
 
 oar, many a night of tempest, many a dan- 
 ger from false lights, and many a scud under 
 bare poles (with pride's ** top-hammer " all 
 gone), before we reach the shining shore. 
 To the last moment on earth our salva- 
 tion depends on complete submission to 
 Jesus. Without Him, nothing; with Him, 
 all things. 
 
 Please bear in mind that salvation sig- 
 nifies simply the process of saving. Our 
 Blessed Master means to save us and our 
 lives for Himself, if we will let Him do it and 
 will honestly co-operate with Him. Yonder 
 is an acre of weeds which its owner wishes 
 to save from barrenness to fruitfulness ; so 
 he subjugates it with plough and harrow 
 and all the processes of cultivation. If the 
 soil should cry out against the ploughshare 
 and the harrow and the hoe, the farmer's 
 answer would be, *^ Only by submission 
 to this discipline can I rear the golden 
 crop which shall be to your credit and to 
 my glory." In like manner, by absolute 
 
A CONSTANT SALVATION. 131 
 
 submission to Christ's will, by constant 
 obedience to His pure commandments, by 
 the readiness to be used by Him entirely for 
 His own purposes can you or I be saved to 
 life's highest end. The instant that I real- 
 ize entirely that I am Christ's, I must also 
 realize that my time must be saved from 
 waste for Him and my influence must be 
 consecrated to Him. All accumulation is 
 by wise saving. Sin means waste, and ends 
 in ruin and remorse. The honest, devoted 
 Christian is Uterally " working out his sal- 
 vation " when he is daily striving to redeem 
 his time, and employ his utmost capacity, 
 and use his every opportunity to make his 
 life a beautiful offering and possession for 
 his Lord. If we were not worth saving, 
 our Lord would never have tasted the bit- 
 ter agonies of Golgotha to redeem us. If 
 every saved follower is by and by to be 
 presented by Christ '* faultless, with exceed- 
 ing joy," then is a Christian life a jewel 
 worthy of His diadem. O my soul, let 
 
132 A CONSTANT SALVATION. 
 
 Him work in me to will and to do accord- 
 ing to His good pleasure, if I can be made 
 to yield this revenue of honor to my be- 
 loved Lord ! 
 
 There is another sense in which Christ 
 furnishes us a constant salvation. His 
 presence saves me in the hour of strong 
 temptation. He keeps me from falling in 
 a thousand cases where T do not directly 
 recognize His hand. When I wake up in 
 the morning, after a night ride in a Pull- 
 man car, I do not know how many human 
 hands have been busy in order that I might 
 ride safely through the pitch darkness ; 
 and when I get to heaven, perhaps I may 
 find out how often Jesus interposed to save 
 me from threatened ruin and from unsus- 
 pected dangers. He was saving me in a 
 hundred ways that I did not dream of, and 
 the visible acknowledged deliverances were 
 all due to Him. Daily grace means a daily 
 salvation. Paul lived thus in constant de- 
 pendence, realizing that if Christ withdrew 
 
A CONSTANT SALVATION. 1 33 
 
 His arm he must sink in an instant. Not 
 for one moment can I dispense with the 
 life-boat until my foot stands where " there 
 is no more sea." 
 
 If these things be true, then we ought ever 
 to be praying: "O Lord, what must I 
 do now to be saved? To be saved from 
 waste of time ; to be saved from dishonor- 
 ing Thee ; to be saved from secret sin ; and 
 to be saved up to the fullest, richest, holi- 
 est service of Thyself? " He can help us 
 to accomplish all this, for His grace can 
 bring us a full salvation. When we reach 
 heaven, we shall no longer need to be 
 saved. The voyage will be over, the dan- 
 gers ended ; the multitudes who have been 
 saved will then walk in the light of the 
 New Jerusalem, and cast their crowns at 
 the feet of Him who purchased for us 
 so ineffably glorious and transcendent a 
 SALVATION. 
 
HEALTHY AND HAPPY. 
 
 THE Christmas bells are ringing in the 
 brightest day in the Christian calendar. 
 The clock of time will soon strike for the 
 birth of another twelvemonth, when every 
 man will wish his neighbor a " Happy New 
 Year ! " To many it will no doubt be a 
 day of sadness, for it will remind them of 
 the loved ones whom the past year has 
 buried out of their sight; but every gen- 
 uine disciple of Jesus, every heir of heaven, 
 ought to possess deep and abiding resour- 
 ces of joy, that lie as far beneath the tem- 
 pests of trial as the depths of the Atlantic 
 are beneath the storms that have lately torn 
 its surface into foaming billows. Every 
 healthy Christian ought to be a happy 
 
HEALTHY AND HAPPY. 1 35 
 
 Christian under every stress of circum- 
 stances. 
 
 A living Christian who is worthy of the 
 name must possess more or less of the Jioli- 
 ness without which no man can see the 
 Lord. There is a misconception and a 
 prejudice in the minds of some good people 
 in regard to this word, on account of the 
 abuse of it by certain visionaries of the 
 ''perfectionist" school. But holiness sig- 
 nifies health of heart and life. It is equiva- 
 lent to the Saxon word wholtJi, and to 
 be holy is really to be whole or healed. 
 Sin is soul-sickness ; regeneration by the 
 Divine Spirit is recovery from that sickness. 
 There is no condemnation of guilt to them 
 who are in Christ Jesus ; He is the physi- 
 cian who delivers them from deadly disease. 
 If good health means misery, then is a 
 sincere Christian a miserable mope ; but 
 if health means a happy condition, then 
 should Christ's redeemed ones be the most 
 cheerful, sunny-hearted people in the com- 
 munity. 
 
136 HEALTHY AND HAPPY. 
 
 There are several characteristics of a true 
 child of God. One of them is that he is 
 forgiven. To be pardoned has made many 
 a prison-door like a gate of paradise. The 
 sweet sense of sin forgiven has been an 
 ecstasy to thousands who had '* groaned, 
 being burdened," but had found relief at 
 the cross of Christ. Another evidence of 
 spiritual health is a good conscience, — a 
 conscience enlightened by the Bible, a 
 conscience kept sweet and wholesome by 
 prayer, a conscience that comforts its 
 possessor, instead of tormenting him by a 
 certain fearful looking-for of judgment. 
 What a diseased liver is in the bodily 
 organization, is a bad conscience in the 
 spiritual man, it breeds continual mischief 
 and misery. " How is your liver ? " was 
 the first question of a shrewd and humor- 
 ous old minister to me on my entrance 
 into the ministry. When I told him that 
 it was sound, he replied, *' Then yoti 7/ do." 
 That Christian never suffers from spiritual 
 
HEALTHY AND HAPPY. 1 37 
 
 dyspepsia who keeps a conscience void of 
 offence towards God and man. 
 
 A healthy soul has a strong appetite for 
 Divine truth. He enjoys the daily manna 
 of the Word, and has no lustings for the 
 " flesh-pots " of the world. It is not the 
 stimulant of spiced pastry that he is after, 
 but the strong meat of the gospel as well 
 as the honeycomb. His soul '* delights it- 
 self in the fatness " of God's Word. To 
 some people Mr. Moody's style of talking 
 about the banquet which the Bible affords 
 him seems like extravagance; the reason 
 is, that their spiritual taste is utterly cor- 
 rupted by feeding on such confectionery as 
 novels and secular newspapers. A combi- 
 nation of Bible-diet and Bible-duties would 
 soon make them as vigorous as Mr. Moody. 
 If he did not show in his own conduct and 
 condition the ''feeding" he lives on, he 
 would not make many converts. 
 
 HoHness is constant agreement with God. 
 It is the agreement of love — deeper even 
 
138 HEALTHY AND HAPPY. 
 
 and sweeter than the most unbroken 
 wedlock. From this harmony of soul with 
 the Divine Will flows a great deep, broad 
 river of peace, which passeth all under- 
 standing and fathoming. This stream grows 
 deeper and wider, until, like an Amazon, it 
 empties into the ocean of eternal love. The 
 holy believer — who accepts God's prom- 
 ises more readily than the best government 
 bonds, who shapes his life in conformity 
 with Christ, who keeps his soul's windows 
 open towards the sun-rising, who makes 
 even a cross the ladder for a climb into a 
 higher fellowship with Jesus, who realizes 
 that just before him lies the exceeding and 
 eternal weight of glory, — cannot be made 
 a sour or peevish or melancholy man by 
 any outward circumstances. The holy- 
 minded Rutherford of Scotland wrote most 
 of his immortal " Letters " within the cell 
 of a martyr's prison. They read like leaves 
 from the tree of life, floated down on sun- 
 beams. *' Come, O my well-beloved ! " he 
 
HEALTHY AND HAPPY. 1 39 
 
 exclaims ; " move fast, that we may meet 
 at the banquet. I would not exchange one 
 smile of Christ's lovely face for kingdoms. 
 There is no house-room for crosses in 
 heaven. Sorrow and the saints are not 
 married together ; or, if it were so, heaven 
 would divorce them." The holiness of such 
 a man is not the enthusiasm of a visionary 
 or the mere outburst of transient emotion ; 
 it is the normal condition of the man, the 
 wholeness of a soul that has been trans- 
 formed by grace into the likeness and the 
 life of Jesus Christ. Keeping Christ's com- 
 mandments keeps the eye clear and the 
 temper sweet and the will submissive and 
 the affections pure : in these lies the rich 
 reward. 
 
 The highest type of piety is cheerful. 
 The more we stud}- the lives and examples 
 of the healthiest Christians, the more we 
 find them to be the men and women who 
 walk in the sunshine. The Luthers, the 
 Wilberforces, the Summerfields, the Guth- 
 
140 HEALTHY AND HAPPY, 
 
 ries, the Spurgeons, and the Norman Mc- 
 Leods were and are the Hving illustrations 
 of the truth that close contact with God is 
 the supremest source of happiness. There 
 is such a thing as " the joy in the Holy 
 Spirit." There is a meat for the soul to feed 
 on that this lying, deceitful, and deceived 
 world knoweth not of. The measure of 
 our holiness is the true measure of our 
 happiness ; it will be the measure of our 
 final enjoyment of heaven. 
 
 Brooklyn, December, 1881. 
 
THE ANGELS OF THE SEPULCHRE. 
 
 IN the most beautiful cemetery at the 
 capital of this Commomvealth stands a 
 marble statue carved by the cunning of 
 Palmer's chisel. It represents '* The Angel 
 of the Sepulchre." On every side the dead 
 are sleeping; but beside them sits this 
 silent sentinel, as if to guard the slumbering 
 dust until the resurrection-trump sounds 
 the reveille on the Judgment morn. That 
 angel which Palmer's chisel fashioned is 
 of solid stone ; but the " angels in white " 
 whom Mary of Magdala saw in the deserted 
 tomb of Jesus were pure incorporeal spirits. 
 They assumed a visible form ; but angels 
 are never described as material beings of 
 flesh and blood like ourselves. Excelling 
 
142 THE ANGELS OF THE SEPULCHRE. 
 
 in strength, they go forth as God's mes- 
 sengers to do His will, to watch over 
 children, to bear home the departed spirits 
 of God's people, and to encamp round 
 about His covenant ones who fear Him. 
 
 From those angelic appearances at the 
 tomb of our Redeemer on His resurrection 
 morn we may gather some cheering les- 
 sons. When the anxious Marys were on 
 their way to that tomb with their spices, 
 the thought flashed into their minds, " Who 
 will roll away for us that rock at the sepul- 
 chre?" But the difficulty is solved in a 
 way that they had not dreamed of. An 
 angel from heaven has already been there, 
 and has opened the gate of rock to let the 
 King of Glory out. So God often sends an 
 angel of Help to roll away our hinderances. 
 Some of them are real obstacles, some of 
 them are created by our fears. The awak- 
 ened sinner often encounters difficulties in 
 a stubborn will, or in long-formed habits, 
 or in obstinate appetites. As soon as he 
 
THE ANGELS OF THE SEPULCHRE. 1 43 
 
 submits to Christ, he finds these difficul- 
 ties give way: divine power achieves for 
 him what his own unaided weakness could 
 not accomplish. 
 
 Many a child of God has been brought 
 under a sore bereavement, and the first 
 thought has been, Oh, how can I bear this 
 burden of grief ? How can I surmount all 
 these new hardships and difficulties? A 
 widow left with a brood of orphans, and 
 with scanty provision to feed and clothe 
 them, is tempted to give up in despair. 
 But when she reaches one difficulty after 
 another, lo ! the stone is rolled away. A 
 friend provides for this lad ; a home is of- 
 fered to another; a third begins to help 
 himself and mother too ; and she soon 
 finds that she can do a hundred things 
 which she thought impossible. Beside the 
 widow in her weeds walked an angel in 
 white, which strengthened her. 
 
 God always has an angel of help for 
 those who are willing to do their duty. 
 
144' ^-^^ ANGELS OP THE SEPULCHRE. ' 
 
 How often have we been afraid to under- 
 take some difficult work for Him, but as 
 soon as we laid hold of it the rock of hin- 
 derance was removed. The tempter told 
 us that if we attempted to save some har- 
 dened soul we should encounter an im- 
 movable adamant. We had faith enough 
 to try, and prayer brought the power 
 which turned the heart of stone to flesh. 
 Evermore the adversary is busy in frighten- 
 ing us from labors of love for our Master. 
 Yet if our single aim is to reach Jesus and 
 to honor Jesus, no hinderance is immovable. 
 The world thought Paul a madman and 
 Luther a fanatic, and Wilberforce and Duff 
 but pious visionaries. When the Omnipo- 
 tent IIelJ> came down, opposing rocks were 
 swept away, and the Devil's guards were 
 put to flight. The very lions which 
 frighten — " Mistrust " and " Timorous " 
 — are discovered to be "chained" when 
 a persevering Christian comes up to 
 them. 
 
THE ANGELS OF THE SEPULCHRE. 1 45 
 
 But Help is not the only angel which 
 God sends to His believing ones. There 
 is another bright spirit, whom we never 
 meet more surely than at the sepulchre 
 where our treasures sleep. The name of 
 this angel in white is Hope. She sits to- 
 day' by the little mounds that cover the 
 forms we loved. When I go out to the 
 grassy hill in Greenwood where my dar- 
 ling boy has lain for a dozen summers, I 
 meet that angel at the tomb. The words 
 she chanted when the casket was sealed up 
 and hidden beneath the earth are sounding 
 still : " All them who sleep in Jesus will 
 God bring with Him." As Mary Magda- 
 lene saw the angel through her tears, so 
 the believer sees through tears of sorrow the 
 white-robed angel of Hope. A clear-eyed 
 angel is she, and one that excels in strength. 
 She hath other ministering spirits with her 
 to minister to the heirs of salvation. Pa- 
 tience attends her, and Prayer with a cas- 
 ket of promises, and Peace with her serene 
 
 10 
 
146 THE ANGELS OP THE SEPULCHRE, 
 
 countenance, and Love, which is stronger 
 than death. 
 
 The tomb in Joseph's garden was filled 
 with light where the two bright spirits sat, 
 '* the one at the head and the other at the 
 feet where the body of Jesus had lain." 
 Even so do the angels of Divine help and 
 hope turn the midnight of sorrow into 
 dawn. To the eye of unbelief the grave 
 is a ghostly spot. Faith peoples ** God's 
 acre " with angels, and fills the air with 
 prophetic songs of praise. And what a 
 scene will the Greenwoods and Mount 
 ■ Auburns presejit when the angelic legions 
 shall roll away every stone, and gather 
 Christ's chosen ones to meet Him on His 
 throne ! 
 
 " Lo ! the seal of death is breaking ! 
 Those who slept its sleep are waking ; 
 
 Heaven opes its portals fair. 
 Hark ! the harps of God are ringing ! 
 Hark ! the seraphs' hymns are flinging 
 Music on immortal air ! " 
 
THE NIGHT-LODGING AND THE 
 DAY-DAWN. 
 
 WHEN travelling in Palestine last 
 year we occasionally came upon a 
 wayside khan. Before one of those rude 
 inns the traveller halts at the sunset, feeds 
 his beasts, stretches himself on the floor, 
 and in the cool dawn of the next morning 
 saddles his horse or mule and pushes on 
 his journey. This familiar custom was in 
 the Psalmist's mind when he wrote, " Weep- 
 ing may endure for a night, but joy cometh 
 in the morning." This verse, literally trans- 
 lated, would read, " In the evening sorrow 
 lodgeth, and at the day-dawn cometh shout- 
 ing." Sorrow is represented as only a 
 lodger for a night, to be succeeded by joy 
 at the sunrising. 
 
148 THE NIGHT-LODGING 
 
 This is a truthful picture of most frequent 
 experiences ; it is full of comfort to God's 
 people, and it points on to the glorious 
 dawn of heaven's eternal day, when the 
 night-watch of Hfe is over. Sorrow is often 
 the precursor of joy; sometimes it is so 
 needful, that unless we endure the one we 
 cannot have the other. Some of us have 
 known what it is to have severe sickness 
 lodge in our bodily tent, when every nerve 
 became a tormentor and every muscle a 
 highway for pain to course over. We lay 
 on our beds conquered and helpless. But 
 the longest night has its dawn. At length 
 returning health began to steal in upon us, 
 like the earliest gleams of morning light 
 through the window shutters. Never did 
 food taste so delicious as the first meal of 
 which we partook at our own table. Never 
 did the sunbeams fall so sweet and golden 
 as on that first Sabbath when we ventured 
 out to church ; and no discourse ever tasted 
 so like heavenly manna as the one our pas- 
 
AND THE DAY-DAWN. 1 49 
 
 tor poured into our hungry ears that day. 
 We sang the thirtieth psalm with melody 
 in the heart, and no verse more gratefully 
 than this one, " Sorrow may endure for a 
 night, but joy cometh in the morning." 
 
 Many a night of hard toil has been fol- 
 lowed by the longed-for dawn of success. 
 When we were weary with the rowing the 
 blessed Master came to us on the waves 
 and cried out, "Be of good cheer; it is I." 
 As soon as He entered the boat the skies 
 lighted up, and presently the boat was in 
 the harbor. The history of every discov- 
 ery, of every enterprise of benevolence, 
 of every Christian reform, is the history of 
 toil and watching through long discourage- 
 ments. I love to read the narrative of Pal- 
 issy the potter, of his painful struggles with 
 adversity, of his gropings after the scien- 
 tific truth he was seeking, and of his final 
 victory. Sorrow and poverty and toil 
 lodged with that brave spirit for many a 
 weary month, but at length came singing 
 
150 THE NIGHT-LODGING 
 
 and shouting. All Galileos and Keplers 
 and Newtons have had this experience. 
 All the Luthers and Wesleys who have 
 pioneered great reformations, and all the 
 missionaries of Christ who have ever in- 
 vaded the darkness of paganism, have had" 
 to endure night-work and watching before 
 the hand of God opened to them the gates of 
 the *' dayspring from on high." This is the 
 lesson to be learned by us pastors, by the 
 teachers in mission-schools, by colporteurs, 
 and by every toiler for Christ and souls. 
 *'We have toiled all night, and caught 
 nothing," exclaimed the tired and hungry 
 disciples. Then in the early gray of t'he 
 daybreak they espied their Master on the 
 beach ; the net is cast on the right side of 
 the ship, and it swarms with fish enough 
 to break its meshes. Nearly every revival 
 season I have ever passed through in my 
 church has been on this same fashion. 
 Difficulties and discouragements have sent 
 us to our knees, and then we have been 
 
AND THE DAY-DAWN, 151 
 
 surprised by the advent of the Master in 
 great power and blessing. God tests His 
 people before He blesses them. The night 
 is mother of the day; trust through the 
 dark brings triumph in the dawn. 
 
 Precisely similar are the deepest and 
 richest experiences of many a regenerated 
 soul. The sorrows of penitence were the 
 precursors of the joys of pardon. I have 
 known a convicted sinner to endure the 
 pangs of contrition when no small tempest 
 lay upon him and no sun or stars appeared ; 
 his soul was in the horror of a great dark- 
 ness. To such distressed hearts God often 
 sends a flood of relief and joy as sudden 
 as the light that poured on Saul of Tarsus. 
 To others conversion has been a slower, 
 gentler process. Like the gradual com- 
 ing of the dawn, — as we have witnessed it 
 from a railway car or from a mountain 
 summit, — darkness has slowly given place 
 to steel-gray, and the steel-gray to silver, 
 the silver has reddened into ruddy gold, and 
 
152 THE NIGHT-LODGING 
 
 all has developed so quietly and steadily 
 that we could not fix the precise birth- 
 moment of the day. Thousands of true 
 Christians cannot fix the precise date of 
 their conversion. But the dawn of hope 
 and new life really begins when the mercy 
 of Jesus Christ is rightly apprehended, and 
 the soul begins to see and to follow Him. 
 
 " 'T is midnight with my soul till He, 
 Bright Morning Star, bids darkness flee." 
 
 Those who suffer the sharpest sorrow 
 for their own sinfulness and guilt, and are 
 brought into the deepest self-loathing, are 
 commonly those who are the most thor- 
 oughly converted. The height of their 
 joy is proportioned to the depth of their 
 distress. Christ is all the more precious 
 to them for having painfully felt the need 
 of Him. The dawn of their new hope 
 has been unmistakably from heaven, and 
 their after pathway has shone brighter and 
 brighter to the perfect day. 
 
AND THE DAY-DAWN. 1 53 
 
 One other truth — the most ineffably glo- 
 rious of all — is illustrated by this simile of 
 the night-lodging in the khan. The earth- 
 ly life of God's children is only a mere 
 encampment for a night. To many are 
 appointed sleeplessness and tears. Some- 
 times through poverty, sometimes through 
 long sickness, sometimes under darkly 
 mysterious bereavements, they have '* wait- 
 ed patiently on the Lord more than they 
 that watch for the morning." They knew, 
 that the dawn of heaven lay behind the 
 clouds, and they held out in confident 
 expectation of it. Paul himself had such 
 sharp experiences that he once confessed 
 that he had '' a desire to break camp and to 
 be with Christ, which is far better." A 
 most lovely Christian, whose life had been 
 consumed by a slow cancer, went home to 
 glory a few days ago. While the poor frail 
 tent of the body was decaying by inches, 
 she was feasting on rapturous glimpses of 
 heaven. Through the long weary night 
 
154 
 
 THE NIGHT-LODGING, ETC. 
 
 pain and suffering lodged in that fluttering 
 tent ; but at length 
 
 " The dawn of heaven broke, — 
 
 The summer morn she sighed for, 
 The fair, sweet morn awoke." 
 
OUR TWO HOMES. 
 
 nPHAT beautiful passage in the fifth 
 -*- chapter of the Second Epistle to the 
 Corinthians, according to Dean Alford's and 
 Dr. Samuel Davidson's happy rendering, 
 reads about as follows : " Being always con- 
 fident, and knowing that whilst we are in our 
 home in the body we are away from our 
 home in the Lord. For we walk by faith, 
 not by appearance. We are still confident, 
 and well content rather to go from our 
 home in the body and to come to our home 
 in the Lord." 
 
 The contrast is a sharp and distinct one 
 between oiir two homes. In the first verse 
 of this chapter Paul speaks of our present 
 home as a mere ''tent " ; the other home is 
 
156 OUR TWO HOMES. 
 
 " a mansion of God eternal in the heavens." 
 In other words, my soul — which is really 
 myself — has two homes : one of them is 
 in this frail and flimsy tent which I call 
 a body, and the other is in that enduring 
 and glorious habitation called heaven. A 
 tent is the most transient of all lodging- 
 places. It is pitched to-day ; to-morrow its 
 pins are pulled up and the canvas is carried 
 away to some other spot, leaving only the 
 ashes of a camp-fire. What a vivid picture 
 is this of the frail body in which my im- 
 mortal soul encamps for a few swift-flying 
 years ! Half of all the human tents do not 
 last more than thirty years ; and if by much 
 mending and patching they are made to last 
 for fourscore years, yet they easily yield to 
 the blast of death and fly away. Paul's tent 
 had seen some rough usage ; it was so mi- 
 gratory and so drenched with storms, and 
 so mauled by persecutions and scarred with 
 the lash, that the old hero who lived in it 
 longed " to depart and to be with Christ, 
 
OUR TWO HOMES. 1 57 
 
 which was far better." He was constantly 
 getting homesick for his Father's house. 
 A happy day was it for him when the exe- 
 cutioner's axe clove his poor old leaky tent 
 in twain, and suffered his heaven-bound 
 spirit to fly away and be at rest. 
 
 A thousand things, speculative and poeti- 
 cal, have been written in regard to the 
 Christian's future home. The Bible says 
 just enough to rouse our curiosity and to 
 stimulate speculation, but not enough to 
 spoil the sublime mystery which overhangs 
 it like a cloud of glory. A few things seem 
 to my own mind at least to be well estab- 
 lished. Heaven is a place ; it is not a mere 
 state or condition of blissful holiness. A 
 distinctly bounded place of abode it must 
 be, or else John's view of it from Patmos 
 was an idle phantasm. God's Word speaks 
 of it as a " city," and as filled with " many 
 mansions." The light of it proceeds from 
 a central throne; for the Lamb in the 
 midst of the throne is the light thereof Its 
 
158 OUR TWO HOMES. 
 
 pellucid pavements are like unto fine gold. 
 The music of its praises fell upon the old 
 apostle's ear with such a sublime roar of 
 melodies that — likening them to the Medi- 
 terranean's surf dashing upon the rocks 
 of Patmos — he calls them ''the sound 
 of many waters." Surrounding this vast 
 scene of splendor he saw something which 
 he describes as walls of precious stones, 
 and these walls were pierced with gates 
 of pearl. 
 
 There is something beautifully sugges- 
 tive in this many-sidedness of heaven, 
 with gates of entrance from every point 
 of the compass. It emphasizes the catho- 
 licity of God's house, into which all the 
 redeemed shall enter, from all parts of the 
 globe, and with their varying theological 
 and denominational opinions. All shall 
 come in through Christ Jesus, and yet 
 through many gateways. Thank God, no 
 bigot shall be able to bar out one soul that 
 has been washed in the blood of the Lamb ! 
 
OUR TWO HOMES. I 59 
 
 The variety of " fruits " on the tree of Hfe 
 points to the idea of satisfying every pos- 
 sible taste and aspiration of God's vast 
 household of many kindreds and tongues 
 and nations. Why surrender the view of a 
 literal home of the redeemed such as John 
 has described to us? Why volatilize it all 
 away into the thin vapor of metaphor? If 
 John did not see what he described, then 
 he saw nothing at all ; and if he sav/ noth- 
 ing real, then the closing visions of the 
 Apocalypse are a splendid fog-bank. For 
 one, I prefer to hold to the actual words 
 which Revelation gives me, and if, when I 
 get there, I find something utterly different, 
 then it will be time enough to make the 
 discovery. In the mean time there are 
 millions of us who are simple-hearted 
 enough to fire our faith by singing about 
 those 
 
 " Bulwarks with salvation strong, 
 And streets of shining gold." 
 
 That our heavenly home will satisfy our 
 
l6o OUR TWO HOMES. 
 
 fullest social longings, we cannot doubt. 
 No one need complain of lack of " good 
 society" there. Old Dr. Emmons is not 
 the only Christian who has fed his hopes 
 of " a good talk with the Apostle Paul." 
 Dr. Guthrie is not the only parent who 
 has felt assured that "his little Johnnie 
 would meet him inside the gate." Many a 
 pastor expects to find his converted flock 
 as a " crown of rejoicing to him in that 
 day." The recognition of friends there 
 cannot possibly be a question of doubt. 
 No barriers of caste can separate those who 
 are children of the one Father and dwell- 
 ing in the same household. When Cineas, 
 the ambassador of Pyrrhus, came back 
 from his visit to Rome in the days of her 
 glory, he reported to his sovereign that he 
 had seen a " commonwealth of kings." So 
 will it be in heaven, where every heir of 
 redeeming grace will be as a king and 
 priest unto God, and a divine adoption 
 shall make every one a member of the 
 
OUR TWO HOMES. l6l 
 
 royal family. What a comforting thought 
 it is that we shall never be compelled to 
 pull up our tent-poles any longer in quest 
 of a pleasanter home ! Heaven will have no 
 " moving-day." No longer shall we dread 
 to be pulled away from associations which 
 we love, and sent off into strange and 
 uncongenial places. When you and I, 
 brother, have packed up at the tap of 
 death's signal-bell, we shall never be 
 obliged to change our quarters again. 
 There is a delightful permanence in that 
 word, " Forever with the Lord." 
 
 The leagues to that home are few and 
 short. Happy is that child of Jesus who is 
 always listening for the footfall this side of 
 the golden gate, and for the voice of invita- 
 tion to hurry home. A true life is just a 
 tarrying in the tent for Christ until we go 
 into the mansion with Christ. ** I hope 
 your Master has gone to heaven," said some 
 one to a slave when his master was dead. 
 '' I'se afraid he has not gone dare," replied 
 
 II 
 
1 62 OUR TWO HOMES. 
 
 Ben, " for I never heard him speak of dat. 
 When he go to de North, or de Virginny 
 Springs, he always be gettin' ready for 
 many weeks. I never see him gettin' ready 
 for goin' to heaven." The simple negro's 
 words are a test and an admonition for 
 each one of us. For let us be assured that 
 not one of us will ever see that Home 
 unless we are made ready for it by Christ 
 Jesus. 
 
ASLEEP IN JESUS. 
 
 "VJO scriptural description of death is so 
 -^ ^ suggestive and so consoling as that 
 which is conveyed by the familiar word 
 sleep. It recurs often. Stephen the mar- 
 tyr breathes his sublime prayer, and then 
 " he fell asleep." Our Lord said to His 
 disciples : " Our friend Lazarus sleepeth ; 
 but I go that I may awake him out ot 
 sleep." Paul, in that transcendently sub- 
 lime chapter on the resurrection, treats 
 death as but the transient slumber of the 
 body, to be followed by the glorious awak- 
 ening at the sound of the last trumpet. 
 And then he crowns it with that voice of 
 the Divine Spirit, that marvellous utterance 
 which has been said and sobbed and sung 
 
164 ASLEEP IN JESUS. 
 
 in so many a house of bereavement: "I 
 would not have you to be ignorant con- 
 cerning them which are asleep ; for, if we 
 believe that Jesus died and rose again, even 
 so them also which sleep in Jesus will God 
 bring with Him." No three words are in- 
 scribed on more tombs or on more hearts 
 than these, " Asleep in Jesus." 
 
 These declarations of God's Word de- 
 scribe death as simply the temporary sus- 
 pension of bodily activities. Not a hint is 
 given of a total end, an extinction, or an an- 
 nihilation. The material body falls asleep, 
 the immortal spirit being, meanwhile, in 
 full activity; and the time is predicted 
 when the body, called up from the tomb, 
 shall reunite with the deathless spirit, and 
 the man shall live on through eternity. 
 What we call dying is only a momentary 
 process. It is a flitting of the immortal 
 tenant from the frail tent or tabernacle, 
 which is so often racked with pain and 
 waxes old into decay. Paul calls it a de- 
 
ASLEEP IN JESUS. 165 
 
 parture: ''To depart and be with Christ." 
 The spiritual tenant shuts up the windows 
 of the earthly house, ere he departs; he 
 muffles the knocker at the ear, so that no 
 sound can enter; he extinguishes the fire 
 that glows about the heart, stops the warm 
 currents that flow through the veins, and 
 leaves the deserted house, cold, silent, and 
 motionless. We, the survivors, bend over 
 the deserted heart-house ; but there is nei- 
 ther voice nor hearing. We kiss the brow, 
 and it is marble. The beloved sleeper is 
 sleeping a sleep that thunders or earth- 
 quake cannot disturb. But what is there 
 in this slumber of the body that suggests 
 any fear that the ethereal essence of the 
 spirit has become extinct or even sus- 
 pended its activities? When the mother 
 lays her darling in its crib, she knows that 
 sleep simply means rest, refreshment, and 
 to-morrow morning's brighter eye, nimbler 
 foot, and the carol of a lark in her nursery. 
 When you or I drop off into the repose of 
 
1 66 ASLEEP IN JESUS. 
 
 the night, we understand that the avenues 
 of the five bodily senses are closed for a 
 few hours ; but the mind is, meanwhile, as 
 busy as when we wake. 
 
 Death means just this ; no more and no 
 less. As Maclaren has vigorously said : 
 " Strip the man of the disturbances that 
 come from a fevered body, and he will 
 have a calmer soul. Strip him of the 
 hindrances which come from a body that 
 is like an opaque tower around his spirit, 
 with only a narrow crevice here and a 
 narrow door there — five poor senses with 
 which he is connected with the outer uni- 
 verse — and, surely, the spirit will have 
 wider avenues out to God. It will have 
 larger powers of reception, because it has 
 become rid of the closer confinements of 
 the fleshly tabernacle. They who die in 
 Jesus live a larger, fuller, nobler life, by 
 the very cessation of care, change, strife, 
 and struggle. Above all, they live a fuller, 
 grander life, because they * sleep in yesus ' 
 
ASLEEP IN JESUS. 1 6/ 
 
 and are gathered into His embrace, and 
 wake with Him, clothed with white robes, 
 awaiting the adoption — to wit, the redemp- 
 tion of the body." In God's good time, 
 the slumbering body shall be resuscitated 
 and shall be fashioned like to Christ's glo- 
 rious body — i. e., it shall be transformed 
 into a condition which shall meet the wants 
 of a beatific soul in its celestial dwelling- 
 place. Verily, with this transcendent blaze 
 of revelation pouring into the believer's 
 death-chamber and his tomb, we ought not 
 to sorrow as they that have no hope. 
 
 In this view of death (which is God's own 
 view) how vivid becomes the apostle's ex- 
 clamation : '* I am confident and willing 
 rather to be absent from the body and to be 
 present with the Lord." Who is it that is 
 to be absent? I, Paul — the living Paul — 
 I can be entirely quit from that poor taber- 
 nacle of flesh and yet live ! My body is no 
 more me than the corn-ship was me when 
 it went to pieces on the shore of Melita and 
 
1 68 ASLEEP IN JESUS. 
 
 I escaped safe to land. Paul was entirely- 
 willing that the old, scarred, and weary body- 
 might be put to sleep, so that he might go 
 home and be present with his Lord. Then 
 mortality would be swallowed up of life. 
 Go to sleep, poor, old, hard-worked body, 
 the apostle seems to say, and Jesus will 
 wake thee up in good time, and thou shalt 
 be made like to the body of His glory, ac- 
 cording to the working whereby He subdues 
 all things unto Himself. 
 
 Let us not be charged with pushing this 
 Scripture simile too far when we hint that 
 it illustrates the different feelings with 
 which different persons regard the act of 
 dying. When we are sleepy, we covet 
 the pillow and the couch. When work is 
 to be done, when the duties of the day are 
 pressing on us, then we are not only broad 
 awake, but the more aw^ke the better. 
 Sleep then is repulsive. Even so do we 
 see aged servants of God, who have fin- 
 ished up their life-work, and many a suf- 
 
ASLEEP IN JESUS. 1 69 
 
 ferlng invalid, racked with incurable pains, 
 who honestly long to die. They are sleepy 
 for the rest of the grave and the home 
 beyond it. Yet desire for death is not 
 natural to the young, the vigorous, or es- 
 pecially to the servants of God who are 
 most intent upon their high calling. These 
 recoil from death, however saintly or spirit- 
 ual they may be, or however strong be their 
 convictions that heaven is infinitely better 
 than this world. It is not merely the natu- 
 ral shrinking from death (which the man 
 Christ Jesus felt in common with us), but 
 the supreme idea of serving their God to 
 the utmost possible limit. For Christ here, 
 with Christ yonder, is the highest instinct 
 of the Christian heart. The noble mission- 
 ary, Judson, phrased it happily when he 
 said : *' I am not tired of my work, neither 
 am I tired of the world ; yet, when Christ 
 calls me home, I shall go with the gladness 
 of a boy bounding away from school." He 
 wanted to toil for souls until he grew sleepy y 
 
170 ASLEEP IN JESUS. 
 
 and then he wanted to lay his body down 
 to rest and to escape into glory. 
 
 A dying-bed is only the spot where the 
 material frame falls asleep. Then we take 
 up the slumbering form and gently bear it 
 to its narrow bed in mother earth. They 
 who sleep in Him shall awake to be forever 
 with their Lord. 
 
 On this tremendous question of the res- 
 urrection of our loved ones and our reunion 
 with them our yearning hearts are satisfied 
 with nothing less than certainty. Poetic 
 fancies are gossamer; analogies from the 
 sprouting of seeds and bulbs, probabilities, 
 intuitions, and all philosophizings are too 
 shadowy to rear a solid faith on. We de- 
 mand absolute certainty, and there are just 
 two truths that can give it. The first one 
 is the actual fact of Christ's own resurrec- 
 tion from the death-slumber; the second 
 is His omnipotent assurance that all they 
 who sleep in Him shall be raised up and 
 be where He is forevermore. Those early 
 
ASLEEP IN JESUS. 171 
 
 Christians were wise in their generation 
 when they carved on the tomb of the mar- 
 tyrs, ** In yesii Christo obdonnivit,'' — In 
 Jesus Christ he fell asleep. 
 
 The fragrance of this heavenly line per- 
 fumes the very air around the believer's 
 resting-place. Giving to the Latin word its 
 true pronunciation, there is sweet melody, 
 as well as Heaven-sent truth, in this song 
 of the sleepers : — 
 
 " Oh ! precious tale of triumph this ! 
 And martyr-blood shed to achieve it, 
 Of suffering past — of present bliss. 
 
 * In Jesn Christo obdormivit.' 
 
 " Of cherished dead be mine the trust. 
 Thrice-blessed solace to believe it, 
 That I can utter o'er their dust, 
 ' Ijt Jesu Christo obdormivit^ 
 
 " Now to my loved one's grave I bring 
 My immortelle, and interweave it 
 With God's own golden lettering, 
 
 * In Jesu Christo obdormivit? " 
 
AN AUTUMN HOUR IN GREEN- 
 WOOD. 
 
 JEREMY TAYLOR has quaintly said 
 *^ that it is well for the living to knock 
 often at the gates of the grave. This 
 thought is ever present with me when I 
 thread the walks, and from its many eleva- 
 tions, look down into the embowered and 
 shaded vales of Greenwood. The word 
 " cemetery " signifies a sleeping-place ; and 
 Greenwood is simply a vast and exquisitely 
 beautiful dormitory, with two hundred and 
 forty thousand slumberers in their narrow 
 beds. Some rest in rosewood beneath roofs 
 of marble ; some are laid in the coarse pine 
 box w^hich scanty poverty hides in the 
 bosom of mother earth. But amid all the 
 
AN A UTUMN HOUR IN GREENWOOD. 1 73 
 
 miscellaneous multitude, the Master know- 
 eth them that are His ; them also which 
 sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. 
 
 Yesterday, under a golden October sun- 
 shine, I climbed Fountain Hill, and stood 
 amid the fragrant flowers which adorn the 
 bedroom in which my own beloved ones 
 sleep. In that little group lies the beauti- 
 ful and accomplished daughter, who van- 
 ished from the home, of which she was the 
 joy and pride, a twelvemonth ago. Those 
 lips now silent never spoke a disobedient 
 word; the first pang she caused us was 
 when her own noble loving heart ceased to 
 beat. Blessed are such pure hearts, for 
 they shall see God. Never did the spot 
 look more surpassingly lovely, with its im- 
 mediate canopy of maples tinged with their 
 autumn radiance, and the distant waters of 
 the Bay gilded by the setting sun. The 
 gentle murmurs of the neighboring fountain 
 seemed like a requiem over the slumberers 
 that were lying closely around. Across 
 
i /4 AN A UTUMN HO UR 
 
 the carriage-drive was the arched Gothic 
 tomb in memory of some who sank with 
 the sinking steamer " Arctic " into the 
 ocean depths. Just over on Oak Ridge 
 I could descry the bronze bust of Hor- 
 ace Greeley, with its familiar inscription, 
 *' Founder of the New York Tribune." 
 Several friends beside whose dying beds 
 I had once stood, were lying in their turf- 
 covered beds beside me. And all over the 
 greensward, and through the crimsoning 
 trees, poured the bright rays of the au- 
 tumnal sun, kindling the flower-plats into a 
 brilliant glow, and making the very atmos- 
 phere glorious as with the anticipated light 
 of the better world. 
 
 Standing in that august light I said to 
 myself, So He giveth His beloved sleep ! 
 Thanks be to Him that He takes away the 
 terrors of death from His own redeemed 
 ones by assuring them that death is only a 
 temporary suspension of bodily activities, 
 while the redeemed and immortal spirit has 
 
IN GREENWOOD. 175 
 
 " departed to be with Christ, which is far 
 better." Nor shall the slumber of the mor- 
 tal frame be more than transient. For at 
 the voice of the archangel's trump it also 
 shall awake, and be transformed into that 
 " spiritual body " which is organized for the 
 peculiar atmosphere and activities of the 
 heavenly state. Then shall Christ's ran- 
 somed ones, in their normal and complete 
 condition, — body, soul, and spirit, — be 
 forever with their Lord. 
 
 I fed my faith by recalling how often 
 God's Word pictures the act of dying as a 
 falling into sleep. I recalled the expres- 
 sion which our Lord employed over the 
 couch of Jairus's daughter, and also His 
 memorable words on the road to Bethany, 
 — '' Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep, but 
 I go that I may awake him out of sleep." 
 When Stephen the martyr had uttered his 
 last testimony, and caught his first glimpse 
 of the celestial spheres, he '* fell asleep." 
 This is the term employed in that magnifi- 
 
iy6 AN AUTUMN HOUR 
 
 cent chapter to the Corinthians on the 
 Resurrection, — a chapter whose single in- 
 estimable preciousness is enough to war- 
 rant a revelation from heaven. Jesus the 
 Conqueror is there described as *' the first 
 fruits" — the earliest harvest-sheaf — '' of 
 them that are asleep." As He awakened 
 His slumbering form on the Easter-morn, 
 so shall He awaken those who sleep in 
 Jesus at the Resurrection dawn. 
 
 This beautiful and comforting concep- 
 tion of dying has entered into the experi- 
 ences of multitudes of believers. When 
 the great church-historian Neander drew 
 near to his last moment, he sweetly said to 
 his faithful sister : ** Hannchen, I am weary ; 
 let us go home ; good-night ! " One of the 
 aged veterans of the New York pulpit was 
 heard repeating to himself the simple lines 
 of his childhood, as he was departing: — 
 
 " Now I lay me down to sleep, 
 I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep." 
 
 So have we parents stood beside our 
 
IN GREENWOOD. 1 77 
 
 darlings and watched the soft dews of kind- 
 ly slumber steeping the tired eyelids, until 
 there was no longer voice nor hearing. 
 The agony would have been insupportable, 
 if that process meant extinction and re- 
 morseless annihilation. But the Son of 
 God was ever saying to us, " Not dead, but 
 sleeping: them which sleep in Me, will I 
 bring with Me, that where I am, they shall 
 be also." Innumerable mothers have stayed 
 up their suffering hearts with this priceless 
 consolation. Somewhere I once met with 
 the following lines, which set forth, touch- 
 ingly, a mother's caress of the little form 
 that is growing cold in her arms : — 
 
 " Still she keeps rocking him, 
 
 Ever caressing him, 
 Brushing his hair from his colorless brow; 
 
 Softly they 've whispered her, 
 
 * Life has gone out of him ; ' 
 Gently she answers — * how still he is now ! * 
 
 " Still she keeps rocking him, 
 As though she would shake from him 
 The cold hand of death, like the weights from his eyes ; 
 
 12 
 
178 AN AUTUMN HOUR IN GREENWOOD, 
 
 Rocking the clay of him, 
 "While softly the soul of him 
 Angels are rocking far up in the skies." 
 
 All these blessed thoughts of the tran- 
 sient sleep and the heavenly waking, came 
 to cheer me yesterday as I stood beside the 
 narrow beds covered with tuberoses and 
 geraniums. The setting sun shed its mel- 
 low radiance upon green turf, and marble 
 tablets, and sparkling fountain. In the dis- 
 tance was the placid Bay with a ship or 
 two resting at anchor, — beautiful emblems 
 of a Christian soul whose voyage had ended 
 in the repose of the desired haven. A few 
 birds were twittering their last notes ere 
 they dropped to their perch. The air was 
 as quiet as the dear sleepers beside me, and 
 as I turned from the sacred spot of their 
 slumbers, I bade them as of old ^^good- 
 nighty Beyond these nights of earth, and 
 the last night also, gleams the bright ever- 
 lasting hope of heaven's ** good morjiing! " 
 
The following paragraph from the " New York Evan- 
 gelist "will explain the circumstances under which this 
 little volume was prepared, and also the peculiar sympa- 
 thy which the author has with all those who are seeking 
 for God's light on dark clouds of sorrow. 
 
 DIED, in Brooklyn, on Friday morning, 
 Sept 30, 1 88 1, Louise Ledyard 
 CUYLER, the second daughter of Rev. 
 Theodore L. and Annie E. Cuyler. 
 
 On her return from Narragansett Pier in 
 August she was taken with a fever which 
 soon developed typhoid symptoms. After 
 four weeks she rallied, and appeared to be 
 convalescent; but a relapse occurred which 
 baffled the skill of several eminent physi- 
 cians, and soon proved fatal. During her 
 long illness she sang every day to herself 
 her favorite hymn, ** Abide with me ; fast 
 falls the eventide." It was an early *' even- 
 tide" for a beautiful and accomplished 
 young girl, around whom clustered such 
 
i8o 
 
 fond affections and the highest hopes. The 
 constant calls of anxious friends at her 
 father's door for five weeks, and the grief 
 which overspreads the congregation and 
 the community, attest the deep hold which 
 this lovely daughter had laid on so many 
 hearts. Her characteristic traits were per- 
 fect simplicity and transparent truthfulness, 
 a playful humor, and at the same time a 
 most conscientious obedience to her par- 
 ents and to the commandments of her 
 Saviour. At the early age of twenty-one, 
 this sweet life, which gave such promise of 
 womanly graces and usefulness, has passed 
 into the life of the better world. 
 
 " Out of the pain of night-watching removed 
 Into the sleep that God gives His beloved, 
 Into the dawn of a glad resurrection, 
 Into the house of unbroken affection, 
 Into the joy of her Lord — thence confessing 
 Death in disguise is His angel in blessing." 
 
BY THE REV. T. L. CUTLER. 
 
 I. — POINTED PAPERS FOR THE CHRISTIAN 
 
 LIFE. i2mo $1.50 
 
 ** Dr. Cuyler holds steadily the position which he reached years 
 ago as the best writer of pointed, racy, religious articles in our coun- 
 try. This volume contains many such papers." — Presbyterian. 
 
 II. — THOUGHT-HIVES. i2mo, with Portrait . . $1.50 
 
 " Good-nature, human sympathy, and Christian zeal kindle all 
 Mr. Cuyler's pages into a magnetic warmth. Genial, open-hearted, 
 and fascinating in his style, both spoken and written, he has made 
 for himself a land-wide reputation, and written his name everywhere 
 as a household word." — New-York Evangelist. 
 
 III. — FROM THE NILE TO NORWAY AND 
 
 HOMEWARD. Illustrated $1.50 
 
 "He clothes his narratives an descriptions in graphic and pure 
 English. ' ' — Methodist Quarterly. 
 
 IV.— THE EMPTY CRIB. Gilt edges $1.00 
 
 " A real gem ; the outpouring of a stricken parent's sorrows into 
 the very bosom of the Saviour." — Christian Advocate. 
 
 v. — GOD'S LIGHT ON DARK CLOUDS . . $0.75 
 
 VI.— THE CEDAR CHRISTIAN. i8mo . . . . $0.75 
 
 VII. — STRAY ARROWS $0.60 
 
 ROBERT CARTER A^^D BROTHERS, 
 NEW YORK. 
 
Data Due 
 
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