SQLite format 3@  ii!%%atableTopicsTopicsCREATE TABLE Topics (Title NVARCHAR(100), Notes TEXT) rEa902 Divine Sovereignty{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Geo#D01 The Comforter and His ComO?/  mPO0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 THE COMFORTER AND HIS COMFORTS.\par \par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "Comfort, comfort my people, says your God." Isaiah 40:1\par \par "Make a highway for the Lord through the wilderness. Make a straight, smooth road through the desert for our God." Isaiah 40:3\par \par "Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together." Isaiah 40:5\par \par "I, even I, am the one who comforts you." Isaiah 51:12\par \par Then the Lord told him, "You can be sure I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard their cries for deliverance from their harsh slave drivers. Yes, I am aware of their suffering. So I have come to rescue them." Exodus 3:7-8\par \par Though so far an echo of our prefatory words, this gleam of the Fiery Pillar may well occupy the opening meditation. What, in the darkest hour of trial, is so inspiring and solacing as the simple but sublime thought of the Divine Presence? God near to us, near to us continually; the Pillar emitting no fitful intermittent flame, but "all the night with a light of fire." He whom that light symbolized and enshrined, not only ordering our afflictions, but, in them all, identifying Himself with His people in their time of trouble. "I know their sorrows,"\emdash "I have come down to deliver them," were words spoken on the threshold of the Exodus.\par \par Though they actually preceded the manifestation of the Cloud, we may well regard them as the key-note to the entire night-song of pilgrim Israel. The same assurance is thus expanded by a later Psalmist: "When the Israelites escaped from Egypt\emdash when the family of Jacob left that foreign land\emdash Judah became God's sanctuary, and Israel became his kingdom." He proceeds to tell how the Fiery Pillar was then kindled\emdash kindled at the Red Sea, conducting through all the immensity of the wild desert and its darkness, until they reached the border river\emdash "The SEA saw it and fled, JORDAN was driven back." In closing the same historic hymn, he renews the theme, as he asks the reason of this opening and closing\emdash rather this continuous miracle. It is "the presence of the Lord\emdash the presence of the God of Jacob" (Psalm 114:1, 2, 3, 7). The Jehovah of the burning bush\emdash the Jehovah of the bur ning column\emdash remained their Divine Consoler and Guide. Night-watch after night-watch the Pillar seemed to flash out the calming assurance, "I, even I, am He that comforts you!"\par \par Afflicted one! this is still the gracious gleam in your deepest night of trial, "I have seen your affliction." Israel's God and His realized nearness is the supreme consolation. Human sympathy is soothing; often precious; indispensable. But it has its limitations, we may even say its shortcomings. There are times when no earthly comforter can meet your case or fathom the aching voids of your heart. Words of gushing condolence, doubtless well intended, are often mis-timed, an intrusion on the sacredness of sorrow. Great afflictions are too deep to be reached by words. Milton's "mute expressive silence" is generally the best way of dealing with such; and it is the Divine way.\par \par You remember how He who was Himself the Prince of Sufferers\emdash who understood all the finer feelings and intuiti ons of the soul\emdash the divinely sympathetic Brother-Man, dealt in a recorded hour of bereavement? He takes His disciples aside from the crowd. "Come," said He, on hearing of the death of the Baptist, "Come apart into a desert place, and rest awhile" (Mark 6:31). He knew, with discriminating tenderness, that sorrow often most appreciates the shade; the responsive sigh, the pensive unspoken look; the grasp of the hand, the unbidden tear\emdash away from "the minstrels making a noise" (Matt. 9:23), the c onventionalisms of consolation. True are the poet's words to his "Friend on the death of his sister"\emdash\par \par "With silence only as their benediction,\par God's angels come;\par Where, in the shadow of a great affliction\par The soul sits silent."\par \par Reader, seek thus, in your hour of loneliness and sadness, to stand amid these "silences of heaven," and hear the whisper of love from Him who is the Author and Sender of your trial, and who best com prehends its severity: "Fear not, for I am with you. Be not dismayed" (marg. Look not around you), "for I am your God" (Isaiah 41:10). A writer tells us that the old motto of the Fatherland is still preserved in United Germany. It may be seen as a heraldic device, sometimes engraved on shrine or portal, or emblazoned on military standard, or heard as a war-cry amid the thunders of battle. It is the same which forms the chief watchword, the strength and support of the Christian in his "great fight of afflictions"\emdash "God is with us".\par \par Yet, alas! despite of this, the soaring wings of faith and trust will at times droop; the old reclaiming word may, and doubtless will intrude\emdash "If the Lord be with us, why then has all this befallen us?" (Judges 6:13). There is no response, no solace, save in the simple words of acquiescence\emdash "Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight!" (Matt. 11:26). Trial ever has been, and ever will be, His method of parental dealing. He employs it as the ballast of the soul\emdash it steadies the ship. The angels of affliction conduct "through the wilderness." Their herald-cry is in the words of one of our motto-verses\emdash "Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a high way for our God" (Isaiah 40:3).\par \par The Desert\emdash He calls us, as He did Philip of old, from beautiful Samaria, with its groves and gardens, its rippling streams and healthful breezes\emdash it may be from our appointed human work, imperious claims and urgent responsibilities\emdash to Gaza, which is desert (Acts 8:26). The way to the Kingdom is by the way of the Cross. It is he "going forth weeping, bearing precious seed," who at last is rewarded with the harvest reaping and the harvest-home (Psalm 126:6). Those who have traveled amid the sandy wastes and scant herbage of the Pillar-route know well that the dew falls thickest (most drenching) after a day of burning heat. The dews of the Spirit's grace fall most copiously after the heat of fiery trial. It is then the promise of the Divine Comforter is made good, "I will be as the dew unto Israel" (Hosea 14:5).\par \par "When we walked," says Richter, "under the forest aisles in summer, the foliage hid from us God's sweet skies. But it was only when the desolating winds of winter had made the branches bare, that through those very black and naked boughs we could all the better discern God's eternal guiding star." It is the midnight sea, ploughed by the keel of trial, in which a brighter and better than natural illumination is manifested. In that most beautiful of inspired idylls, the Bride of the Song is represented as saying, "By night I sought Him whom my soul loves" (Sol. Song. 3:1).\par \par "The Pillar in the night" of our volume was light in a cloud: a lustrous gleam in a cloudy setting. It is said of God, "He makes the clouds His chariot" (Psalm 104:3). "A great cloud with the fire infolding itself " (Ezek. 1:4). It is for us, therefore, to feel assured, that the clouds of life, often so gloomy, are in reality "the chariots of God." This thought inspires a living poet's invocation\emdash\par "Oh, make my clouds Your chariots; so shall I learn to see\par That the mist that dims, the glory is itself a light from Thee;\par For the shadows of the wilderness to me shall sing aloud,\par When I find Your nearest coming, in the advent of a cloud."\par \emdash Sacred Songs.\par \par I may close this meditation with two thoughts regarding the Divine Comforter and His comforts.\par \par (1) He is an UNCHANGING Comforter. He survives all trials, all vicissitudes. He is the living Fountain that remains ever fresh, ever flowing, over-flowing, when other surroundings are crumbling, or have crumbled to decay. Our oldest and best writer of historical romance speaks thus of a Well, which in a former century was close by one of the ancestral palaces of England: "This fountain of old memory had been once adorned with architectural ornaments in the style of the sixteenth century. All these were now wasted and overthrown, and existed only as moss-covered ruins: while the living spring continued to furnish its daily treasures, gushing out amid disjointed stones, and bubbling through fragments of ancient sculpture." In a far higher, diviner sense is this typical of the true "Well of Water springing up unto everlasting life."\par \par "They shall perish, but You remain." Lover and friend may be put far from you and your acquaintance into darkness: the face and the place that once knew you may know you no more. "They truly were many, because they were not allowed to continue by reason of death." But the voice steals down from the lips of Him who is changeless among the changeable, "I am He who lives and was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore!" Go, weave this word-pattern in your web of sorrow, "My flesh and my heart may fail; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever" (Psalm 73:26). "I, even I, am He that comforts you."\par \par (2) My second thought is, that He is the SOLITARY comforter.\par \par These are the words of the great Leader of the Hebrew host: "Did ever a people hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard? Know that the Lord He is God; there is none else beside Him" (Deut. 4:33, 35). "None else" can comfort. It is the avowal of every child of trial\emdash "In the multitude of the sorrows that I had in my heart, Your comforts (alone) have refreshed my soul" (Psalm 94:19, Prayer Book version). These comforts are His exclusive remedies. The world, with all its garish blessings and fascinations, cannot give them. The world with all its tribulations cannot take them away. Philosophy and the schools can yield no such solvent. Affliction baffles the most profound earthly forces and panaceas.\par \par In these our days there is many an intellectual triumph to be recorded. All hearts may well pulsate with pride as we hear of the ever-increasing victories in the realm of science. Honor to its experts and votaries\emdash they may well be laurel-crowned. But what can science, in the zenith of her achievements, do for us amid the deepening floods of trial? With all her spoils and trophies can she utter the longed-for assuring word, "When you pass through the waters I will be with you"? (Isaiah 43:2). In the darkest hour of all, what response has she to give to the Prophet's anxious question "How will you do in the swelling of Jordan?" (Jer. 12:5). There is but One who can say, "Through the rivers, they shall not overflow you," "I will restore comforts unto him and to his mourners" (Isaiah 57:18). "Deep calls unto deep at the noise of Your waterfalls; all Your waves and Your billows are gone over me. Yet the Lord will command His loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life" (Psalm 42:7, 8).\par \par As the Pillar of the desert was formed of one isolated column or cloud, with no other to support it, so is He all-sufficient in Himself: wiser than all others, kinder than all others, independent of all others. Though it may be no more than a legend\emdash one amid many such told of in the desert march and in connection with the Pillar-cloud, it may here be recalled. It was on the occasion of the death of Aaron. Moses was commanded to announce to his beloved brother that Aaron was about to die. In doing so (thus runs the Jewish tradition) the great leader and lawgiver let fall many tears. Ascending Mount Nebo together, Moses still weeping all the way, they came at last to a large cavern in the rock, where a couch with funeral trappings was prepared and ready. Aaron was calm and composed; Moses still wept sorely. "Why, Moses," said the other, "are you so in tears?" "Because," was the reply, "when our sister Miriam died, I had you to be with me in the hour of death. Now, when that comes I shall die alone." "No, brother, not alone: Jehovah will be with you. He will smooth your dying pillow. He will close your eyes, and be better unto you than all mourners and funeral rites. God shall be in the place of brother or sister." And the legend thus touchingly closes, "the word of Aaron came true."\par \par "All men forsook me," was the plaint of Paul, in the Mamertine dungeon, with a violent death before him\emdash "Notwithstanding, the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me" (2 Tim. 4:16, 17). "How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them?" He, alone, as in the case of His apostle, can relax the galling chain, brighten the lonely prison and the lonely spirit. He alone can wipe the tear-dimmed eye. He alone understands the sob of a broken heart\emdash "I am bereaved!" (Gen. 43:14). Think of Him, rejoice in Him, as what the old divines call "the upmaking Portion,"\emdash all sufficient from center to circumference; no fantasy, but a living, loving, Divine Personality: "The Father of mercies and the God of all comfort" (2 Cor. 1:3). "I, even I, am He who comforts you."\par \par Believe it, you sufferers. Believe that trial is the thunder-cloud with a rainbow often sleeping in its depths: that it is the door opening to the inner chamber where we are invited to touch the King's golden scepter. A quaint writer says, "He demands tribute-money from us; and Affliction is His 'Receipt of Custom.'" "Tarry here," are the words still of the suffering Master. Yes, tarry under the olive shade of your Gethsemane, whatever it is, and "watch wi th Me." Thus will your severest sorrows endear to you the nearness and presence of Him of whom alone it can be said, from His own deep heartfelt experience\emdash "In all their afflictions He was afflicted!"\par \par And then, trust this all-comforting God for the future. He will read, in His own good time and way, the typical parable of our present volume. To quote the familiar words of the poet\emdash\par "By day, along the astonished lands\par The cloudy pillar glided slow;\!par By night, Arabia's crimsoned sands\par Returned the fiery column's glow.\par \par "And oh, when stoops over pilgrim-path,\par In shade and storm the frequent night,\par Be you long-suffering, slow to wrath,\par A burning and a shining light!"\par \par Yes, the time will undoubtedly come when "in Your light we shall see light." The afflictions of the present resemble what the clefts and unsightly gashes were to the Israelites when encampe"d beneath the savage cliffs of Sinai. Their gloom and terror and mystery were all gone when beheld at the far distance in the flush of evening. So, too, will your experiences of trial be, when seen bathed in the glory of unsetting suns. What now is like the tolling of funeral bells will then appear rather to have been preparatory and preparation-chimes, ringing in the festal worshipers to the Church of the glorified. No purpose of God regarding you will remain unfulfilled\emdash no flower uncrowned with blossom.\par \par Lord! let nothing dim the brightness of the Pillar, in the midst of present environing gloom! Let that gloom rather inspire me with greater ardor of heart and lip to pray, "I beseech You, show me Your glory!" Turn my night of weeping into a morning of joy. Let me hear the Prophet's refrain\emdash the sweet promise of Your love\emdash as a voice crying in the wilderness\emdash\par \par "Comfort, comfort my people says your God."\par \cf1\fs23\par } $rgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "At the Lord's command they encamped, and at the Lord's command they set out. They obeyed the Lord's order, in accordance with his command through Moses."\emdash Numbers 9:23\par \par In the season of desolating bereavement no thought is more needed to comfort and sus%tain than that of the Divine Sovereignty.\par \par Does affliction spring from the dust, and trouble from the ground? Are life and death regulated by nothing better than accident and chance? Are we at the mercy of second causes? Could suffering couches, sick-beds, and death-beds, have been averted by human foresight? Does God reign? or is this world abandoned to self-rule? At best, if Deity be acknowledged, is He only some abstract, arbitrary Impersonal Force, withdrawn to the sublime solitudes &of space; as little conversant and sympathetic, as the fabled gods of Olympus were, with the needs and trials of His people? Or what is worse, "the God of thunderbolts"; inexorable, stern, and vengeful, as were the idols of the old Etruscans, or Kali and Vishnu of the Hindoos?\par \par Though dismissing the last with its repellent terrorism, it is indeed not easy, at times, to rise, even in the case of those who own the Divine Fatherhood, above the tyranny of secondary agencies. The Sovereignty 'of the Supreme Controller is often confronted with human culpability. "If such and such only had been done. An oar, a floating spar, a grip of the hand, would in time have saved my child!" Timely precaution\emdash a yard farther apart, would have averted the lightning stroke, or escaped the precipice. An improvised rope, where the fire-escape was absent, would have prevented the most dreadful of catastrophes\emdash "The Lord does not see, neither does the God of Israel regard." "Surely my way is hidden fr(om the Lord, and my judgment has passed over from my God!" If not, why these unanswered prayers? Why, to these impassioned pleadings, is the earth as brass and the heaven as iron? Does Jehovah, or the twin scepters of Destiny and Fate, rule the Universe? "Why has the Lord our God done all this to us?" (Jer. 5:19)\par \par Hush this covert or avowed atheism. "The Lord reigns; let the earth be glad" (Psalm 97:1). "Who knows not, in all these things, that the hand of the Lord has wrought this?" (Jo)b 12:9). Never was the pillar of the desert a truer symbolic pledge than here. God goes before His people of every age "all the night with a light of fire." This world may, indeed, appropriately be called, as was the broad field at Shechem in a future age where Abimelech was crowned King\emdash "the plain of the Pillar" (Judges 9:6). There flashes far and wide, farthest and widest in the deep midnight of trial, the gleam of the Divine Sovereignty. This is the legend for every human soul: it forms the hist*ory of Pilgrim-Israel now as of old\emdash "And the Ark of the covenant of the Lord went before them to seek out a resting place for them" (Numb. 10:33). That Ark moved at the bidding neither of earthly leader nor priest. Its every movement was determined by the Divine Shepherd of Israel Himself\emdash "the Angel of His Presence." In the words of our motto-verse, "At the commandment of the Lord they rested in the tents, and at the commandment of the Lord they journeyed" (Numb. 9:23).\par \par Go+d's providences, to take a long-subsequent incident from one of our own centuries, are like the land-birds which hovered over the vessel of Columbus when he was all uncertain as to his track. "Let us follow them in their course," said his seamen. The explorer hearkened to the wise counsel. Before long the shore was hailed and the anchorage of a new world secured. There is no halfway truth\emdash we must own and follow the guiding Pillar; and recognize, step by step, encampment after encampment, the presen,ce of the All-seeing God has beset me behind and before, and has laid His hand upon me" (Psalm 139:5). The old Patriarch, in that same Arabian desert, grasped and antedated a true Christian philosophy, when he turned away from all devil-born suggestions of second causes: sandstorm, whirlwind and lightning, flash of Sabaean sword and spear. Gazing devoutly out of his darkness, he owned alone the dealings and decrees of a Personal God. His cries have been the stay as well as the rebuke of many a sufferer un-der a brighter dispensation\emdash "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken" (Job 1:21). "Behold He takes away, who can hinder Him? Who will say unto Him, What do You?" (Job 9:12). "He knows the way that I take" (Job 23:10).\par \par Yes, stricken one! be assured this is the rudimentary truth in theology, the foundation-article in the creed of the afflicted\emdash "God Himself has done it" (Isaiah 38:15). "Jehovah Shammai!" (The Lord is there). Make it your endeavor\emdash your prayer, to listen f.irst, and before all else, to the Voice from the Column which says\emdash "I have appointed that trial, these hours of agonizing suspense, that pining sickness, that wasted body, that impaired mind, that early grave. Think of Me also in your minutest sorrows and their accompaniments. Think of Me, not as a powerful agency occupied only with great things and momentous events; condescending alone to guide the solemn march of stars or the revolution of kingdoms: think of Me, rather, as fixing the dew-drop on /the stem, penciling the unseen flower of the desert, sculpturing the snow-wreath, controlling the undulation of the waves\emdash watching the drop of every leaf in the forest."\par \par Things have a relative proportion and magnitude in the eye of man. They are called large and small. There are no such terms in the Divine vocabulary. "His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and His dominion endures to all generations. (Yet) the Lord upholds all who fall, and raises up all those who are bowed down0" (Psalm 145:14). He feeds the young ravens when they cry. "He does according to His will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can stay His hand" (Dan. 4:35). "Cast your burden He has given you (R.V.) on the Lord" (Psalm 55:22).\par \par Believe, as very essential to your present comfort, that there can be no minimizing of this Divine power and control. Seek to say with the Minstrel King in His hour of great sorrow, "I will be silent, I will open not my mouth, b1ecause YOU did it." Seek that the too merited reproach against the old Hebrew multitude in the desert may not be yours\emdash "Yet in this thing you did not believe the Lord your God, who went before you in the way, to seek you out a place to pitch your tents in, in fire by night, to show you by what way you should go" (Deut. 1:33).\par \par The voice from the Pillar may at times be MYSTERIOUS. It may be heard in thunder-tones; but it is God's voice notwithstanding. Yes, and be assured, there is2 a Divine necessity for it. It may be in the shadow of His hand that He hides us (Isaiah 49:2). But He knows us better, He loves us better, than to leave us unchastened and unchallenged. He sees it would not be well if our path lay all through the sunlight of Beulah. We can confide in His wisdom and power, His grace and love\emdash that He will keep us no longer in the furnace than is absolutely needful. He who lighted it, is seated by, tempering the fury of the flames.\par \par The main lesson 3of this meditation ought to be that of the former\emdash child-like, unwavering trust in the Great Supreme. Beware of misinterpreting His dealings; even when teaching by stern lessons. Much is now in a foreign tongue. All will be translated in heaven. Present experiences of "sorrow " will be rendered into "memories of His great goodness."\par \par "God can read it; we must wait;\par Wait til He teach the mystery;\par Then the wisdom-woven history\par Faith shall read a4nd love translate."\par \par "He disciplines us for our profit" will then at least be the unhesitating avowal. "He that has wrought us for the selfsame thing is God" (2 Cor. 5:5). The King's daughter, all glorious within, will, through the endless ages, be adorned in "her clothing of wrought gold" (Psalm 45:13). Even now we can exult in the assurance that these same angels of affliction spoken of in our last, marshaled and commissioned by the Lord of Hosts, are, on the loom of sorrow, "working f5or us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory!"\par \par Reader, you may thus well proceed under the solemn gleam and guidance of your Pillar, rejoicing that every turn in the desert is known to God, that in night watches of profoundest gloom you are under the sleepless eye of Israel's unslumbering Shepherd. May your experience be, "By His light I walked in darkness." Let patience, and devout recognition of His sovereign hand, be known and read of all men. See that the broken alabaster vase may fill the whole home of your influence with its fragrance. So that of others who, in the endurance of similar trials, have failed fully to own the Divine appointment, it may be said, "They have heard that You, Lord, are in the midst of this people; for You, Lord, are seen face to face; and Your cloud stands over them. "The Lord guided them by a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night. That way they could travel whether it was day or night." Exodus 13:21\par \cf1\fs23\par } 7, and of the Hermonites, from the hill Mizar."\emdash Psalm 42:6.\par \par The psalmists of Israel loved with reiterated interest to recall the memories of the pillar of cloud and fire\emdash the varied incidents in the desert march. "O God, when you led your people from Egypt, when you marched through the wilderness, the earth trembled, and the heavens poured rain before you, the God of Sinai, before God, the God of Israel. You sent abundant rain, O God, to refresh the weary Promised Land." (Ps8alm 68:7, 8, 9). "Your way is in the sea, and Your path in the great waters, and Your footsteps are not known. You led Your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron" (Psalm 77:19,20). In seasons of trial a similar rehearsing in thought of our personal and individual histories cannot fail to be profitable, comforting, strengthening. This is peculiarly so in times of severe bereavement, when tempted, at first, in a spirit of hasty impatience, to say with the faithless, desponding Prophet, "It is b9etter for me to die than to live." In such a retrospect of the Divine doings and dealings, we may well contemplate the mingled faithfulness and love of Him who has "led us all our life long"; ever proving Himself true to His desert name and memorial, "The Lord God, merciful, gracious, long-suffering," "staying His rough wind in the day of His east wind," "tempering the wind to the shorn lamb," "in wrath remembering mercy." The rehearsal is surely calculated to moderate grief and foster trust and lowly sub:mission; prompting, amid present sadder experiences, to say, "I will abundantly utter the memory of Your great goodness and talk of Your righteousness."\par \par The second of our motto-verses, though it has no reference to the Arabian desert, contains a like re-traversing of the pilgrim way by the greatest of the psalmists. During his exile in the land of Gilead, his throne for the time lost, and deeper heart-sorrows gathering around him, he revives his fainting spirit and waning fortunes by re;calling some never-to-be-forgotten experiences associated with help and deliverance\emdash some Ebenezers, we know not what they were, in the Valley of the Jordan, by the slopes of Hermon, or on "the hill Mizar." As he opened these windows of the soul each had some consolatory vista-view, each had some memory of blessing which inspired and reassured him for the future. And not in exceptional times and exigencies alone did he revive these pillar-gleams of a chequered life. When he reached the end of the wiGod in him unfulfilled. He owns redemptive ministries in every event of his existence, summing up the long catalogue with the attestation\emdash "As for God, His way is perfect" (v. 30).\par \par Observe yet further, in this great heart-hymn (the swan-song, written "when God had delivered David from all his enemies"), these rehearsals\emdash records of the past\emdash inspire him with confidence for the days that are yet to come, and for the final day of all. He reverently gazes on the wildernes?s pillar with its reflected lights, and resolves undeviatingly to follow.\par \par Read its prologue: "I love You, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust: my shield, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower (v. 1, 2). For You will light my candle; the Lord my God will enlighten my darkness" (v. 28).\par \par Pilgrim of sorrow! in the midst of your present affliction, be what it may, seek to remember @"all the way by which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness." Subscribe the roll of His suffering children with the wilderness testimony\emdash "They called upon the Lord, and He answered them. He spoke unto theme in the cloudy pillar" (Psalm 99:6, 7). Mingled, with you, as with the kingly mourner of Zion, will\emdash must be, the retrospect. At this moment your past is overshadowed by the gloom of a present chastisement. That chastisement, moreover, may be of no ordinary severity. Is it bereaveAment\emdash the removal of one who seemed the indispensable companion of the pilgrimage, who worked with you, toiled with you, anticipated your every wish, abridged your every care, shared with quick sympathy your every sorrow and anxiety? Now the gushing fountain of joyous existence has ceased to flow. But if you are true in these memories, you will not fail, you cannot fail, even though standing amid the shadows of the Valley, to recall the "goodness and mercy that have followed you all the days of yourB life"; the hospices that have sheltered you; the ministering angels who once guarded you, though they have surrendered earthly trusts for higher ones.\par \par Even in the most chequered of human existences there is more of May than December; the darkest horizon is rainbow-spanned; the bright spots outnumber the dreary. No, no\emdash deal faithfully with God and with yourself. Life is not one uniform leaden sky loaded with weeping clouds. Life is not all music in the minor-key\emdash far less aC crash of discord and dissonance. It is rather made up of blended harmonies. The key-note of its long sonata should rather be "Mercy rejoices over judgment." Take one solace among a hundred others. Though deprived now of visible helps and comforters, nothing can defraud you of the "treasures of memory." The past can never find a vacant place in your library of thought. No page can be torn from any of its volumes. All is sacredly recorded. In these sunny memories you can bask. Your shadows are in front, anDd your sun is behind you.\par \par Then, if you rise to the truly elevated view of the Divine dealings, have not your very trials already proved, or will they not in the future prove, as they were designed to be, aids in the prosecution of the journey, gleams of pillar-light in the midnight march, new spiritual forces assisting in the up-building of faltering purposes and in the reaching of noble ideals? Naturalists tell us of some migratory birds which, in being carried high by contrary winds, Eare thus helped onwards in their flight. So, many, buffeted with the adverse storms of trial (what Augustine calls "the severe discipline of the Lord's mercy") have, with weary, drooping wings, been driven to loftier regions and stimulated to loftier purposes. Savonarola avows how, in his case, crushed affection\emdash the dissolved dream of young life\emdash awoke hitherto slumbering aspirations, and raised his whole being to a consecrated mission for God and man.\par \par Happy those whose triFals thus serve to bring them near to the ever-living, ever-loving One; rousing from the dream of earth, with its often poor cares and debasing secularities, to have their lips attuned to another stanza in the sweet singer of Israel's canticle\emdash "In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried unto my God. He heard my voice out of His temple, and my cry came before Him, even into His ears" (18:6). "They confronted me in the day of my calamity: but the Lord was my stay. He brought me forth also into aG large place; He delivered me, because He delighted in me" (18:18, 19).\par \par "I see the desolated ground\par With dews of heavenly kindness fed,\par And fruits of joy and love surround\par The heart which You have comforted."\par \par The refrain of David's "Psalm of the Exile" is "Hope in God" (Psalm 42:5). Beautiful, at that crisis-hour of his life, was his calm resignation\emdash the absolute resolving, for good or for evil, his own will into that of aH Higher. "If," says he, in words uttered on this same occasion, elsewhere recorded, "If I shall find favor in the eyes of the Lord, He will bring me back again.\'85Behold, here am I, let Him do to me as seems good unto Him" (2 Sam. 15:25, 26).\par \par Be it yours to aim after a similar spirit of lowly acquiescence, whatever the dealings of God may be. Your duty\emdash your bliss\emdash is to ask no questions, or attempt to solve the insoluble, but simply to wait and follow the guiding Pillar inI the spirit of an older patriarch, "faint, yet pursuing" (Judges 8:4). The time will come when "in God's light you will see light"; when, with eyes opened and mysteries solved in whole or in part, you will own the rectitude of Christ's rebuke of unfaithfulness, "Didn't I say unto you, if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?"\par \par It is well, too, to note the Divine order generally in these scenes of changeful and chequered life. The sequence is sorrow first, joy afterwards\emdaJsh the bitter first, the sweet afterwards\emdash the cloud first, the rainbow in it afterwards. Our Marahs and Elims are strangely near and united, just as they were in the successive encampments of Israel in the wilderness. Bonar, who beautifully notes this in his travels through the "Desert of Sinai," goes on to say: "In token, we broke off a small branch of palm from one of these Elim trees, and laying it on the similar branch we had brought from Marah, we tied them together, to be kept in perpetual meKmorial, not merely of the scenes, but of the truth which they so vividly teach."\par \par Aged Jacob at first uttered the hasty verdict that for him there was nothing but "the bitter well." But he had a calmer one at last\emdash "his spirit revived." So the day is assuredly coming when rest will follow the toil and stress of battle, sunshine follow gloom; when bereavement will interpret its often misunderstood mission; when we shall see the present apparently shapeless and incomplete building stLanding forth in the beautiful proportions of Eternity; our fallen and scattered blossom making way for the immortal fruit; the Pillar of the night projecting on the sands far back to the receding horizon a trail of brightness, a pathway of golden promises now luminously fulfilled; our loved ones, we thought we had lost, waiting for us at the Gate, with the cry and the welcome\emdash "We are all here!" (Acts 16:28).\par \par I like the closing words in the following beautiful sentence from one ofM the great masters of thought and feeling of our age, as he speaks of the remembrance of sorrows here, and the blessed watchers yonder: "Their voices, common enough to other ears, fraught to us with unnumbered memories of life, have become the natural music of earth\'85To forget, it cannot be. We daily pass through places which are the shrine of a thousand recollections; we are startled by tones which pour on us a flood of conviction; we open a book, and there is the very name; we write a date, and it is Nan anniversary. \'85That is the most filial hope which, regarding the brotherhood of man as an inference from the paternity of God, looks to heaven as to another home" (Martineau).\par \par Let these interweaved memories and hopes be summed up in the lines of a living singer\emdash\par "I go to sleep, but sleep itself reveals\par The phantoms of a day that long is fled,\par And through the land of shadows softly steals\par The figured presence of the loved and dead.\par \par "O Live in God, and your dead past shall be\par Alive forever with eternal day;\par And planted on His bosom you shall see\par The flowers revived that withered on the way."\par \emdash Sacred Songs.\par \par "Your goodness is so great! You have stored up great blessings for those who honor you. You have done so much for those who come to you for protection, blessing them before the watching world." Psalm 31:19\par \cf1\fs23\par } Ea902 Divine Sovereignty{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Geo#D01 The Comforter and His Comforts{\rtf1\ansi\deff mm'9%03 Memories{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 MEMORIES.\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "I will remember the works of the Lord; surely I will remember Your wonders of old."\emdash Psalm 77:11.\par \par "I will remember You from the land of Jordan6R\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 SICKNESS SOOTHED\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "I said, In the noontide of my days I shall go into the gates of the grave."\emdash Isaiah 38:10 (R.V.).\par \par "The Lord will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing: You will make all his bed in his sickness."\emdash Psalm 41:3.\par \par S "This sickness is\'85for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby."\emdash John 11:4.\par \par "O Lord, by these things men live."\emdash Isaiah 38:16.\par \par One desert experience to which we may well early advert, an experience to which truly may be given the designation of "Night," is the season of bodily pain and suffering. Is there no flash of the Pillar of Fire, in the shape of consolation and comfort, here?\par \par Let none make light of phTysical prostration. Only those who have passed through the ordeal can tell of its severity; specially where prostration is combined with acute anguish. Afflictions cannot well be compared. It is wrong and needless to do so. But, while mental agony, the pang of bereavement, as well as other forms of unspoken suffering intenser still, have their terrible environments, the couch of sickness has a gloom all its own. In other phases of trial there are mitigations\emdash lulls in the storm; the sweet influencesU of nature, the sympathy of friends, and so on. But calm rest is simply impossible when every nerve is racked with torture. Day and night seem to have no room for other than the one monotonous dirge\emdash the passionate questioning\emdash "When shall I rise and the night be gone?"\emdash "Would God it were evening! would God it were morning!"\par \par "All night I kept my lone and silent vigil,\par And looked in vain\par For kindly sleep to soothe my restless tossings\par V And set me free from pain.\par I watched until the dawn's first doubtful glimmer\par Stole through my curtained room,\par And broke with pale grey lights and greyer shadows\par Its formless gloom."\emdash Caillard.\par \par And then, say as we may, there is generally deepest mystery in these experiences. Bereavement has its appropriate, accepted solaces; the sweet memories of buried love; above all, the thought of the bright Beyond. But these weary vigilsW of throbbing pain seem to forbid respite. The world's pleasures, lavishly granted to others, seem strangely, I had almost said cruelly, denied and withdrawn. In many cases the poor flickerings of life are all that remain; the long fierce battle is too surely a losing one\emdash\par "And our hearts, though stout and brave,\par Still, like muffled drums, are beating\par Funeral marches to the grave!"\par \par Yes, to many, bereavement has its higher, loftier solaces: thXe Bible, with its promises; prayer, with its strengthenings; the House of God, with its teachings. But in the case of the sufferer on his couch, even Holy Scripture for the time is, in many cases, a sealed book: the gates of prayer are closed; the footpath to the Mercy-seat is weed-grown. The distant Sabbath bells only convey the remembrance of hallowed associations with "the multitude that kept holiday." There is around nothing but an immensity of darkness! Other broken harps have their surviving stringsY and lingering chords; but the sick man gazes only on "the harp on the willows"\emdash life's sweetest music fails to charm, loving looks fail to be recognized, loving words wake up no responsive smile\emdash the vital springs of being are shattered. In bereavement, God's righteousness is "like the great mountains": it is patent, visible. But often, in sickness, His judgments are hidden from human view in an unsounded "deep!" What then? After such an indictment as this, does light from the wilderness ColuZmn for the first time seem impossible? "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no Physician there?" Can we only discern the dismal side of the Pillar\emdash all cloud, no brightness. If we see our Lord, is it only as the disciples saw Him in their midnight sea? Supposing Him to be an avenging angel, a spirit from the deep, "they cried out for fear!" Or, if the peril increases, can we do no more than hold our breath while life is trembling in the balance and the King of terrors passing by?\par \par [ There is balm, not from Gilead and its mountains of myrrh, but from the everlasting hills of heaven. The flaming Presence is there; and "gives light by night to these." Let us seat ourselves under its gleam and gather a few thoughts of comfort.\par \par Tried one, think of all you are now suffering as needed discipline\emdash the strange but sure pledge of a Father's love. These weary days and nights, be assured, are "appointed," to train you for Himself, His work and service now, and for His b\eatific presence hereafter. Builders at times construct new houses out of ruins. God often does so. From ruined shattered frames He builds up new spiritual dwellings, everlasting habitations. Without that discipline you would miss precious lessons. You would willingly evade these; but the evasion would involve sensible loss\emdash a deprivation of moral and spiritual strength. It is no mere hollow sentiment, but a proved experience from the memory of long sickness: "It is good for me that I have been affl]icted" (Psalm 119:71). "O Lord, by these things men live, and in all these things is the life of my spirit: so will You recover me, and make me to live" (Isaiah 38:16).\par \par "If any of you have ever stood and watched moth or butterfly emerge from the cocoon, you will have noticed, after the first little opening, with what seemingly pained struggle the young wings are striving to free themselves. In your pity you take up the cocoon, and end the struggle by carefully cutting open the useless s^hroud and freeing the living winged creature. It is said that any such kindness simply means an undeveloped wing-power, by which the butterfly will never be able to soar and enjoy its life. That struggle is the needful condition of full wing-power. Men who cannot struggle can never soar" (Lovell).\par \par To use a different illustration, no stroke of the chisel in the hand of the Great Craftsman is unnecessary. The soul, like the facets of the diamond, needs the best and sharpest tools to fashi_on it into a gem for the Redeemer's crown. This is specially true of those to whom the present meditation is addressed. Many an angel of resignation speeds up to heaven from the sick-couch with the message, "Made perfect through suffering."\par \par Remember this, you who are now undergoing the desert experience, wandering through the wilderness "in a solitary way." There is no place, no occasion (just because of its dreariness and weariness) where God can be more glorified than on a couch of pa`in, or where more real spiritual strength is imparted. In the words of one of our motto-verses, "The Lord will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing. You will make all his bed in his sickness" (Psalm 41:3). To use the familiar earthly phrase, how many in that peculiar school of suffering have "graduated with honors." They came out of "great tribulation." Tribulation\emdash the threshing-flail\emdash the grain-sifter, as the root-word imports, winnowing the husk from the seed. And this "tribulation" (ataking the Apostle's words in his great chapter) "works" (not impatience, as we would have expected, but) "patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope."\par \par It was the smitten rock of the desert that yielded the refreshing waters. Your own feeling, perhaps, may be that with you there can be no such stream; that pent up in that couch of disease and suffering, life is useless\emdash effort for good is denied. You are like the wounded bird with broken wing struggling in the furrowb; envying those around you in their capacity of flight and soaring. Perhaps, though reluctant to own it, you may be among the faithful toilers who have broken down, by reason of your very fidelity to duty. The bow was overstrained, and the bowstring has snapped; the harp-chord was overstrained, and the music has ceased. This is the history of many an arrested ministry at home or in the Mission-field. The life of excessive consecration has only paid its martyr penalties. Many a sick-bed sufferer reminds once of the Marechal Niel rose that flowers so luxuriantly as often to bloom itself to death. By the very profusion of goodness the root becomes weakened, the overloaded blossom exhausts the mortal energy. But, be still; God has work for you to do, when the wings are clipped and the eye is filmed. If activities are impossible, not so the exercise of the passive virtues.\par \par While you may be bewailing curtailed opportunities and baffled purposes, you can in other ways "glorify Him in the fires.d" You may see in that shattered body of yours only the house in ruins of which I have spoken, while, in His sight and under His loving discipline, you may in truth be noiselessly rearing an angel-visited temple. Yours is a shadowed couch; but it is in "the shadow of His hand" He has "hidden you." You may be able to say nothing and to do nothing; yet you can remember, in your very helplessness, Milton's noble line\emdash "They also serve who only stand and wait."\par \par "The Lord is good to thoese who wait for Him." Thus have many stricken souls, by patience and resignation under protracted anguish, been made preachers of righteousness; the chamber of suffering and the bed of languishing made as the House of God and the Gate of heaven! They have been unconsciously singing "Songs without words," and if called to depart, have left a trail of light behind them. The bereft, who long loved to watch that couch, will recall the "patience with joyfulness" of its occupant.\par \par The followinfg verses are from the "Swan-Song"\emdash written on his death-bed, and found after his departure\emdash of one of the best and best known of our hymn-writers. The place where Horatius Bonar penned the words gives emphasis to the silent farewell testimony\emdash\par "Long days and nights upon this restless bed\par Of daily, nightly, weariness and pain!\par Yet You are here, my ever-gracious Lord,\par Your well-known voice speaks not to me in vain\par 'In Me you gshall have peace!'\par \par "The darkness seems long, and even the light\par No respite brings with it, no soothing rest\par For this worn frame; yet, in the midst of all,\par Your love revives. Father Your will is best.\par 'In Me you shall have peace!'\par \par "Sleep comes not, when most I seem to need\par Its kindly balm. Oh, Father, be to me\par Better than sleep; and let these sleepless hours\par Be hours of blessed fhellowship with Thee.\par 'In Me you shall have peace!'\par \par "Father, the hour has come; the hour when I\par Shall with these fading eyes behold Your face,\par And drink in all the fullness of Your love.\par Until then, oh, speak to me Your words of grace\emdash\par 'In Me you shall have peace!'"\par \par Above all, look, suffering one, to Him who among His other experiences as the Man of Sorrows knew, as no one else did, the combination iof mental and bodily anguish. "He Himself bore our sicknesses." He, the Great Physician, has, in His Divine-human Person, walked the wards of the Hospital of humanity. If, as we believe, the strongest natures feel deepest\emdash are often most sensitive to pain, surely in a Divine sense was this true of the Ideal Man\emdash the Prince of sufferers\emdash who alone could make the challenge, "Was there ever any sorrow like unto My sorrow?" "Can you drink of the cup that I drink of, and be baptized with the jbaptism that I am baptized with?" "Yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered." "The Lord," said Savonarola on the morning he was led out to execution, "suffered as much for me."\par \par We cry in our agony, in weakness, failure, perplexity of heart, that there is no hope nor help. No hand seems to direct the storm, no pity listens. "God has forsaken us," we say. Do we say so and not recall the words which fell on that great victory on Calvary\emdash fell from the Conqueror's lipsk, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" "Blackness of darkness and despair, and feebleness sinking without a stay: these are not failures. In these characters was written first the character of our deliverance: these are the characters in which it is renewed" (Hinton).\par \par There is no verse in all the Bible that carries with it a more wondrous message of consolation to the couch of sore suffering than this\emdash it identifies you with the suffering Christ\emdash "Beloved, think it nolt strange concerning the fiery trial that is to try you, as though some strange thing had happened to you: but rejoice, inasmuch as you are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when His glory shall be revealed, you may be glad also with exceeding joy" (1 Peter 4:12, 13).\par \par "O trust yourself to Jesus,\par When you are tried with pain,\par No power for prayer\emdash the only thought\par How to endure the strain.\par \par "Then is the hour for proving\par His mighty power in thee;\par Then is the time for singing,\par 'His grace suffices me.'"\par \par Come, O sufferer! and like the peasant woman of Galilee touch the hem of His garment. Listen, O sufferer! to the dual chimes floating across the river, under the last gleam of the Wilderness Pillar\emdash "Neither shall there be any more pain." "The inhabitant shall not say, I am sick."\par \cf1\fs23\par } 11-e06 Mysterious Dealings{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fy%05 Consolation and Strength{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 CONSOLATION AND STRENGTH\par \par nY904 Sickness Soothed{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0Qo "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "I have seen his ways, but I will heal him; I will guide him and restore comfort to him."\emdash Isaiah 57:18.\par \par "Your shoes shall be iron and brass; and as your days, so shall your strength be."\emdash Deut. 33:25.\par \par Both these verses take us to the desert of AFFLICTION under the canopy of its starless night.\par \par The first consists, if I may so describe it, of a fourfold flash fprom the Pillar of Fire in the environing darkness\emdash a fourfold promise with its graduated scale of consolation. God "sees" us, then He "heals" us, then He "leads" us; then, as the climax, He "comforts" the smitten heart.\par \par It is He alone who does all this. His is the seeing, loving, sympathetic eye; His the healing touch, His the leading, guiding hand, His the restoring solaces. We may recall words of exquisite tenderness\emdash parental love, in another similar voice from the Pillarq, recorded in Jeremiah, where the Divine Speaker thus describes His dealings with His people in the wilderness (and they are a true emblem of His dealings with His afflicted Israel still). "In the day that I took them by the hand (like a father) to bring them out of the land of Egypt" (Jer. 31:32).\par \par In the other verse\emdash a verse more especially associated with the mystic column of the Exodus, (it forms one of the farewell utterances of the leader of the chosen race)\emdash there is cronveyed a lesson of trust for the future. The "Israel of God," in the most comprehensive sense of the term, are exhorted, resolutely and bravely, to hold on their desert journey, with all its privations\emdash wind-storm, hurricane, blinding sand driving in their faces, sharp stones bruising their weary feet. But He who sends their trials gives them pilgrim-garb and pilgrim-sandals specially suited for the roughest, thorniest, most rugged road: "Your shoes shall be iron and brass."\par \par And sthen, if the future\emdash that unknown, unrevealed future\emdash obtrudes itself with trembling apprehensions, the fear of fearful things, strength is promised equal to the day: "As your days, so shall your strength be." The "marching orders" of the past are still addressed to the caravan of mourners in every age. "Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward." There is no time for lingering: camping in these "tents of Kedar." The wilderness way must be trodden. "Not" as an old writer has it, "tare they to be carried, but with staff in hand to plod on as best they may." In the very effort of bearing tribulations, facing difficulties, and confronting duty, grace will be given.\par \par It is indeed no small part of trial, especially after a lacerating bereavement, when the tendrils of the heart are wrenched from creature props, to face the world again; to encounter the old engagements; to toil through the old imperious mechanical drudgeries and grapple with the conventional commonplacesu of life. But anything is better than becoming a prey to morbid feeling and querulous inaction. There is a Divine panacea in work. I was recently struck with this passage in a life of the greatest of the many great proconsuls of India, and a Christian besides, on hearing of the saddest of personal sorrows. It reminds us of what Tacitus relates of Agricola. "He wrote a line to his private secretary begging for work, no matter what kind." In another Biography of the day\emdash these are the words of one as veminent in literature as the other was in statesmanship\emdash "The troubles of labor" (sending a message to a friend in deep sorrow) "are God's most bountiful mercies on such occasions. Prayers and labor are the only consolations." Or, as this has been translated into verse, with a wise philosophy, by George Macdonald\emdash\par "Weep, if you will, but weep not all too long,\par Or weep and work, for work will lead to song."\par \par Elijah was miserable away from former activwities, as he sat moping under his desert juniper tree, or crouched within the cave of Sinai. "Go, return on your way to the wilderness," was God's bracing command and antidote; and his crushed spirit revived. The solitudes of Horeb were left; the moodiness of the lonely life was exorcized in the resumption of the ministries of Jezreel and Carmel.\par \par Mourner, go also your way under the shelter of the twofold saying\emdash the twofold gleam of the Pillar-God's promised presence, and God's prxomised strength. Not aiming at getting the better of your trial\emdash dulling it by some false opiate; but becoming the better for it, by grasping anew the pilgrim staff, and with girded loins pursuing your appointed way. Even if the darkness be gradually deepening, the fiery pillar is gradually brightening. It is a question of divine counterpoise and proportion. Strength adequate\emdash more than adequate\emdash for all emergencies.\par \par As you are tempted at times to travel onwards with dyrooping head and faltering step, let the watchword of the primitive believers in their hours of "suffering affliction" be heard\emdash "To heaven with your hearts". Let your response, like theirs, be\emdash "We have raised them to the Lord!"\par \par "Duty's path may thorny be,\par Steep may be her climbing;\par But upon her hill-top free,\par Sabbath bells are chiming."\par \par Depend upon it\emdash the day will come when His gentle, tender dealing will be zowned and manifested\emdash gracious illuminations from the flaming cloud. Standing on the other side of the river, with the wilderness discipline forever ended, you will then have no memory but this\emdash "Your right hand has held me up, and Your gentleness (or, as that has been rendered\emdash Your loving correction) has made me great" (Psalm 18:35).\par \par One thing we must bear in mind. As the Pillar of old was (we may believe) gradually lighted, gradually revealing its glory at the vanis{hing of day, so it may be, and doubtless will be, with you. Do not expect a sudden or miraculous illumination. The Great Physician, as in the first of our motto-verses, bids you wait His time, "I will (leaving the period indefinite) heal him, and restore to him comforts." They are only strangely unskilled in trial\emdash the sanctities of bereavement\emdash who would expect and exact the suddenness of an unnatural submission, and harshly forbid the heart its season of sorrow.\par \par Nature, in| her great yearly parable, teaches the true lesson. The seed of the flower has a slow, long battle with the overlying earth before its petals nestle under the blue sky and are bathed in the sunlight. Often the more beautiful the blossom the greater is the struggle. But the battle is at last won. "The winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth" (Cant. 2:12). So let us trust God that in due time\emdash His own time\emdash strength will be made perfect in weakness. The law in }the material and spiritual world is the same, "out of weakness made strong." "For this cause we faint not," is the gradual experience of the weary, burdened pilgrim of sorrow, "for though the outward man perish, the inward man is renewed day by day" (2 Cor. 4:16).\par \par Meanwhile God will take His own way with us, not ours. Sometimes He will say in His succouring love, as He disappoints our fears and more than realizes our hopes, "I removed his shoulder from the burden" (Psalm 81:6). At other~ times he keeps the burden on: it may even be for a time adds to it, and then He either takes it off, or gives us augmented strength to bear.\par \par Happy those who can tell, as their experience and resolve\emdash\par "I come not to avoid my care;\par I come not to desert the strife;\par I come to seek new strength to bear;\par I fly to find new power for life.\par \par "When noontide brings its work to all,\par I find my task so hard to be\par That I would sink, did You not call,\par My strength is perfected in Thee."\par \par Let us only reliantly lean upon Him in the extremity of our weakness; not "discouraged because of the way." He will not reproach us for our feeble pulse-beats, when with plans crossed and purposes thwarted, and deepest clouds lowering, we pass through the Valley of Baca. He will not deal harshly with us if at first it be only with lisping, stammering tongue and bated breath we say, "Your will be done."\par \par Yet, also, observe, His word is conditional on patient continuance in well doing\emdash "Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart" (Psalm 27:14). Be very sure that He has some great end in this trial. Seek that it may make you holier, humbler, more gentle, more submissive. Let His dealings serve to quicken your footsteps to the true Land of promise, until, the fiery pillar ceasing, the fiery chariot descends to bear you up to reunions that never can be dissolved.\par \par O gracious Healer, Up-binder, Leader, Consoler, come in all the plenitude of Your pledged love and faithfulness! Enkindle this flaming Column in my present darkness. Put in my hand the staff of unwavering trust. Give me the sandals specially fitted for the bleeding feet; so that my experience may be that of the mighty host of sufferers who have trodden the same path, "They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them out of their distresses" (Psalm 107:4, 5, 6).\par \par If we seek to do our duty in "the daily round, the common task," glorifying God in the season of solemn adversity, He will meet us half-way. "He meets him that rejoices and works righteousness, those who remember You in Your ways" (Isaiah 64:5). "I am the Almighty God" was the Divine watchword to the earliest of the Bible's Pilgrim Fathers\emdash GOD, ALL-SUFFICIENT. We have heard of the Wady Mukatteb, in the Arabian Peninsula, with its "written rocks,"\emdash the strange hieroglyphics of later pilgrims in the track of the Israelites. Reader, in closing this meditation, lift your eye to a great monolyth in the wilderness of affliction. Let the gleam of the fiery pillar fall on its letterings. It is an inscription applicable to all varying seasons and phases of trial\emdash "As your days, so shall your strength be."\par \cf1\fs23\par } s22 MYSTERIOUS DEALINGS\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "What I do you know not now; but you shall know hereafter."\emdash John 13:7.\par \par Not "now." The Pillar may as yet be unlighted; no stars may as yet be in the sky. The one thought and experience may be\emdash "this great and terrible wilderness." "Where is now my God?"\par \par Alas! it is easy with the lip to speak of the duty of lying silent under the rod\emdash the nobleness of submission. This exhortation, glibly spoken, comes too often from those who have never themselves entered the inner depths of trial; who, however kindly meant, venture to address the smitten heart with conventional phrases of solace. They, unwittingly but unskillfully, probe the wound; in ignorance of how their words of intended condolence only lacerate. Resignation, aided with the soothing influences of time, does generally, and in due course, manifest itself. In the deepest night-watches of sorrow, the lullabies, not of man but of God, come in to soothe to rest, and to still the surges of the soul.\par \par The assurance which heads our meditation, varying in its phraseology, is often that which Christ employs. On the present occasion, when His own disciples, all unconscious of their impending bereavement and orphan-hood, were at His side\emdash when He Himself was on the borderland of superhuman suffering\emdash too truly the Pillar without the gracious radiance\emdash when in His hour of gloom and desertion He uttered the "climax cry,"\emdash His balm-word is, 'Do not make rash assertions; do not form hasty conclusions; do not misinterpret mysterious dealings, looking more at the clouds in the horizon, than at the golden waves rippling at your feet. The Pillar now, and in moments of impending terror, may be but a darksome column to you; dark as it was to the Egyptians of old. You look in vain for illumination, guidance, comfort. But leave your "hereafter"; leave alike the dreary present and the desolate future with Me. I would deepen the lesson in this the hour when I Myself most need it\emdash "Be still, and know that I am God."'\par \par Objects and processes in nature and common life may aid illustration.\par \par Go visit in thought one of the luxuriant valleys of the Holy Land, with which He who spoke our motto-verse was so familiar in His daily journeyings. Amid the abundant vegetation, there is one tree peculiar to the country, alike in Judea, Samaria, and Galilee\emdash the mulberry or sycamore-fig, whose cluster-fruit, much resembling the fig in appearance, is brought to perfection in high summer. But how is this ripening obtained? The process is strange, abnormal. To all appearance it involves the mutilation both of branch and fruit. I shall leave one to describe who is familiar beyond most with the flora of the Holy Land, as well as the happiest of spiritual interpreters. "In order to produce fruit, the part of the tree where it buds requires to have a cut or wound made in it; for, unless this is done, the tree will be barren. From the wound or opening made in this way, a bud springs up which grows and forms the fruit. Then, further, when the fruit is about to be ripe, it requires to be punctured with a sharp instrument in order to make it eatable. \'85The sycamore tree originates in a wound and is ripened by a wound."\par \par Take a kindred illustration familiar alike at home and in Palestine. Watch the pruning of these vines. Most of us may have seen the process. What an apparently merciless spoilage! These graceful offshoots running along the trellis\emdash these exquisite leaves of tender green\emdash the beauty alike of the terraced hills of Syria and of the home conservatory\emdash a delight and refreshment in form and color\emdash the last thing the uninitiated would dream of sacrificing, now strew the ground or the cold flagstones at your feet. "To what purpose is this waste?" The purpose to the ordinary inexperienced eye, indiscernible, as in the case of the sycamore, has in due season its revealing. The mellowed purple autumn clusters will vindicate the needs-be and wisdom of the seemingly ruthless use of the pruning-knife. The lopping of what is unnecessary, is in order to give fresh strength to the branches: to allow the vital sap and vital forces to permeate the leaders, swell the fruit, and ensure glory and abundance to the fruitage.\par \par Watch that block of exquisite marble! It has looked from its heights since the birth of Time over the blue waters, or been gazed down upon by galaxies of stars in the depths of an Italian night-sky. Why disturb this sleep of ages? Why subject this fragment of a noble cliff to the tool of workmen, defrauding earth and heaven of the grandest of monoliths: wrenching it from its "throne of rocks" to lie prone, scarred, discrowned, amid dust and debris? Follow it to the sculptor's studio. There is a slumbering angel in that insensate mass. The chisel of Michael Angelo transforms the outcast thing into all but breathing life, and transmits a legacy of power and beauty to unborn generations.\par \par Watch, yet again, behind the tapestries! Note the blurred colors and tangled web in their bewildering confusion. To the inexpert eye all is disharmony and ugliness. Pass from the row of skillful workers to the other side of the framework, and see the picture in process of manufacture. It is a piece of finished loveliness\emdash every tint and color blended in perfection\emdash a triumph of textile art.\par \par God is that Fig-pruner, Vinedresser, Sculptor, Artist. He works unseen. His ways are past finding out. Present dealings ofttimes appear crude, harsh, unkind. That loving heart pulseless; that kindling eye of genius closed; that tender frame, shattered with the scar-marks of suffering; that home, so long resonant with joy and song, silent and voiceless.\par \par Wait the disclosures of Eternity. Then shall we see what we were unconscious of at the time, that all was needed. That vine and sycamore have not been pruned in vain; the marble has not been wrenched from its rock-socket and chiseled in vain; the "pleasant pictures" have not been wrought in the web of life in vain. Doubts and questionings and impeachments will be at an end then: "In that day, you shall ask Me nothing" (John 16:23). A friend of Principal Shairp tells, that, on the morning he died, looking out with his old love of nature on a Highland loch, he said, "It is very misty now, but it will soon be perfectly clear." Yes, there will be no trace or memory in the halls and walls of heaven of broken thread and inharmonious pattern. The completed tapestry will then at least, when the Divine shuttle has done its work, be seen to glow with perfect and perpetual beauty in the Palace of the King.\par \par Meanwhile listen to the following words of some gifted minstrels. They seem to form an appropriate triplet of Hope and Trust for all downcast Pilgrims\emdash\par "I hear it singing, singing sweetly,\par Softly in an undertone,\par Singing as if God had taught it,\par 'It is better further on!'\par \par "Night and day it sings the sonnet;\par Sings it while I sit alone;\par Sings it so my heart will hear it,\par 'It is better further on!'\par \par "Sits upon the grave and sings it;\par Sings it when the heart would groan;\par Sings it when the shadows darken,\par 'It is better further on!'\par \par "Further on! but how much further,\par Count the milestones one by one?\par No\emdash no counting, only trusting\emdash\par 'It is better further on!'"\par \par In different imagery, here is the panacea of the greatest of our living poets, as thus he describes the Personation of the same heavenly Faith and Trust\emdash\par "She reels not in the storm of warring words;\par She sees the best that glimmers through the worst;\par She feels the sun is hid but for a night;\par She spies the summer through the winter bud;\par She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls;\par She hears the lark within the songless egg;\par She finds the fountain where they wailed 'Mirage!'"\par \par While a still later singer adds his sweet tribute\emdash as if the desert and the night Pillar were in view\emdash with the great Light of glory terminating all\emdash\par "Not yet you know how I bid\par Each passing hour entwine\par Its grief or joy, its hope or fear,\par In one great love-design:\par Nor how I lead you through the night\par By many a various way,\par Still upward to unclouded Light\par And onward to the Day!"\par \par "Why are you cast down, o my soul? And why are you disturbed within me? Hope in God! for I shall yet praise him who is the health of my countenance."\par \cf1\fs23\par } ue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 PRECIOUS DEATH\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints."\emdash Psalm 116:15\par \par Another gleam of the desert Pillar in the closing night of all. Despite of prevailing unbelief and rebellion, the verse may doubtless have served as an epitaph for the graves of not a few of the Israelites in the course of their long travel from Egypt to Canaan; but specially appropriate surely would its inscription be on the heights of Mount Nebo.\par \par Never was "life" more "precious"; never death apparently more baffling; never loss more irreparable. The great commander\emdash the great hero of that vast host, to be summoned away before his work was completed! His eye was yet undimmed\emdash his natural force unabated. His was manhood in its highest consecration\emdash manhood on which God had set His royal mark. It was in a critical season, also, in the Exodus march, when sagacity and forethought\emdash all the astutest qualities of leadership were needed. Ten thousand others might well be spared. But it was the indispensable one, with his serene wisdom and inspiring presence, "the representative of God," to whom the summons was addressed\emdash "Go up and die!" (Deut. 32:49-50).\par \par The call was meekly responded to. All alone he ascended to his sepulcher, all alone he departed. If that departure took place at night, he had better than symbol of fiery pillar\emdash (the funeral candle of the desert). The Jehovah of the radiant column was Himself close by. For not by kinsman, or armed warrior, or stoled priest\emdash not by man nor by angel were his funeral rites performed. The legend on his grave is the strangest, grandest in Scripture. It tells that the most honored of all the burial rites of earth were his. "God buried him."\par \par "Nobly your course is run;\par Splendor is round it;\par Bravely your fight is won,\par Victory crowned it.\par In the high warfare\par Of heaven grown hoary,\par You are gone like the summer's sun,\par Shrouded in glory!"\par \par We can imagine next day, as the sun rose on the mourning camp, how the tribes or the best among them, as they realized their void, would, with bated breath, give expression to their emotion by antedating, in spirit at least, the words of the Psalmist: "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints!"\par \par Reader, though in circumstances more personal and domestic, you may at this moment be absorbed in grief over the enigma and mystery\emdash the havoc and defiances of death. The desire of your eyes and the delight of your heart may have been taken from you. You may be, indeed you are, unable yet to grasp hold of the words at the head of this meditation or get beyond the natural expression of the broken heart\emdash "Precious is the Life!" You are standing by a sepulcher of buried hopes. The hush of oblivion\emdash a silence that almost may be felt is around you. It was but yesterday existence was a "valley of vision" opening everywhere glades and vistas. Now it is a yawning chasm spanned with a "Bridge of Sighs," from the farther side of which seems to come the dirgeful, piteous accents\emdash "Those who would pass from hence to you cannot!"\par \par All that seems left now are inanimate portraits looking down from the walls. You have memories\emdash doleful souvenirs and associations\emdash no more; the flower planted in the garden; the love-birds with drooping wings in the untended cage; the hushed notes of favorite music; the unshared walk by stream or meadow; it may even be the deserted plaything or unused toy. The charm has retired from these life-pictures. The once long, prophetic dream has vanished like summer lightning. You had fondly hoped to keep your loved ones at your side\emdash to claim their ministries of affection in times of sickness, perplexity, trouble\emdash saying, in the great Master's words, "Tarry here and watch with me!" What havoc a few brief months have wrought! Your castles of golden sand! One wave, or it may be wave upon wave, of calamity has come, and swept them away. Whether it be beautiful natures, or strong natures\emdash the one like the graceful birch and its tresses, the other like the ancestral oak "moored in the rifted rock." At morning they were bathed in sunlight or fanned by gentle zephyrs; but the unforeseen storm has been let loose, and the things of "beauty and strength" lie prone on the ground. As you sit under your "Oak of Weeping," casting its shadows on the grave of the loving and beloved, these lines of an unknown mourner may express simply and pathetically your experience\emdash\par "What did the old year bring?\par Six feet of sod in the acre of God\par Where the robins sweetly sing.\par "What did the old year bring?\par A silent hearth and a saddened earth,\par With the loss of everything."\par \par Or words of pathetic tenderness and truth, better known\emdash\par "Break, break, break,\par At the foot of your crags, O sea!\par But the tender grace of a day that is dead\par Shall never come back to me!"\par \par No, say not "Never." That sick-bed, that grave, has a better beyond. In the midst of your tears, listen to the words of this old minstrel of Zion. Let them steal into the hushed chamber like a serenade of angels\emdash "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints!" Death with its densest darkness to sight and sense (a pillar of cloud indeed), is, in the words of the poet, "stricken through, with rays from the inner glory"; the hopes full of immortality. As the Pillar that was all gloom and mystery to the Egyptians was all light to Israel, so is the gate of death when seen from within the heavenly portals. An iron gate on this side; on that, "every gate was one of pearl" (Rev. 21:21).\par \par "You grope, tear-blinded, in a darksome place,\par And touch but tombs. Look up, these tears will run\par Soon in long rivers down the lifted face,\par And leave the vision clear for stars and sun."\par \par Let not the depressing "nether voice and vision" recall to you only the shrine once so sacred, now a heap of dust mouldering to decay. Death is not annihilation. It is the blossom dropping, that the immortal fruit may ripen. The bud forming\emdash waiting to burst forth into verdure next spring\emdash is the cause of the old leaf falling off. It is truly to make way for a better, a more blessed Easter, in which decay is unknown. George Herbert's thought of the passing from this world to glory, as "going from one room to another," is a feeble exponent of the reality. I like Mason's definition better, "Death is the funeral of all our evils, and the resurrection of all our joys." It is a step in the infinite progression of the soul. It is the encasing sheath taken from the cocoon to let the incarcerated spirit free. It is God's own summons\emdash "Come up higher." The casket may perish\emdash the jewel is indestructible. Jesus Himself encountered death; He entered the dark valley and its darkest experiences with a hymn of triumph "Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in Him!" (John 13:31). In a lowlier sense, your dear departing ones, falling or fallen asleep, can echo these words of their dying, ever-living Lord.\par \par The last saying of a well-known Christian senator\emdash venerable in years as mature in faith, may be recalled: "You are leaving," said his friend, "the land of the living." "Say not so," was his reply; "I am leaving the land of the dying, and going to the land of the living."\par \par "Farewell, farewell, my beloved!\par We must say farewell again,\par And I know that your heart is breaking\par With a great and speechless pain.\par Yet things are clear to the dying,\par Which the living cannot see,\par And God, in His infinite mercy,\par Has comfort for you and me.\par Soon we shall think on the parting,\par And the sorrow it gave, no more;\par Yet we could not have known such gladness\par Unless we had wept before."\emdash Caillard.\par \par Ponder, also, the beautiful clause in our motto-verse\emdash "Precious in the sight of the Lord." Natural\emdash only too natural\emdash is the clinging of the bereft heart rather to the preciousness of the life. It is different with the great Life-giver. He sees His work done\emdash the mission of existence completed. Life is but a loan from Him. At His good pleasure He revokes the grant and resumes His own. As a father rejoices to welcome back again his son from the distant colony after years of absence\emdash as the shepherd of the parable rejoices with the angels of heaven over the "lost and found"; so, in the sight of the great Lord of all, precious is death: because it takes the pilgrim to his heavenly Haven, the child to his heavenly Home. As with Moses, GOD "buries" your loved ones yes, and "His own beloved ones," that He may leave all that can die in the earthly valley, and take all that lives forever to Himself in the eternal Canaan. Whether it be from the heights of Pisgah, 4000 years ago, or from the grassy turf and "mouldering heap" of the quiet British church-yard of today, there comes the chime\emdash the blessed requiem: "The beloved of the Lord shall dwell in safety by Him" (Deut. 33:12).\par \par Yet another thought, suggested casually in an interesting volume describing simple Christian peasantry under the sunny skies of Northern Italy, with a faith different from ours, but with hearts the same. At times, with them, as with us, loved ones are taken, the knowledge of whose preciousness is confined to the home circle. They die otherwise unknown. While outwardly more distinguished lives and deaths are unfolded in volumes to the world, their deeds, their gracious characters, loving words and loving ways are left unchronicled. But, unrecognized by man, they are not forgotten in heaven. There are recording angels in default of human pens. The writer tells the beautiful myth (a poetical way of stating a reality), "They have a story in the Veneto, that the angels come down into the Campo Santo at night with their golden censers, and burn incense at the grave of those saints whom nobody knows." "Precious," whether in peasant garb, or in silent chamber, or in priestly clothing, or in royal robe\emdash "in the sight of the Lord" and of His angel-watchers, "is the death of His saints." "The Lord knows those who are His."\par \par Oh, 'tis a placid rest,\par Who shall deplore it?\par Trance of the pure and blest,\par Angels watch o'er it!\par Sleep of their mortal night,\par Sorrow can't break it;\par Heaven's own morning light\par Alone shall wake it."\par \par Bereaved mourner! let these gleams of the Pillar irradiate your present desert darkness. Perhaps He who has taken your dear one from the loves and affections of earth, wishes the more, and the better, to raise your love to Himself. He points you to your withered and blighted flower, and tests you with the challenge\emdash "do you love ME more than these?" Seek, as one of the results of your trial, to make Him increasingly the focus of your being\emdash the Center in the circumference of your present sorrow. Earthly "presences" are gone. But thus would the unchanging God speak from the cloudy pillar by day and the fiery pillar by night\emdash "My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest." He would take you now, as Christ did His disciples, from the Valley of trial up to the Mount to get these glimpses and pledges of reunion\emdash assurances that when those, like Moses and Elias on the heights of Hermon, have departed, you are left with better than the best of earthly friends: "They saw no man save Jesus only!"\par \par If blighted memories of the years that are fled be beyond recall, look forward with confidence to everlasting fellowship in a deathless heaven: they and you with Christ, and Christ and you with them. Resume the midnight march saying, "Let Your loving Spirit lead me forth to the land of righteousness" (Psalm 143:10).\par \par Happy those, who, with love thus revived, and faith strengthened, and resolves quickened, and ties with the glorified renewed, can prolong the verses already quoted\emdash\par "What will the new year bring?\par No more to roam from the heavenly home,\par Where the joy-bells ever ring.\par \par "What will the new year bring?\par A year nearer rest with Him I love best,\par In the presence of our King."\par \par "I wait for the Lord, my soul does wait, and in His word do I hope."\par \cf1\fs23\par } '2 Ui09 Abounding Grace{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\ƁeU08 Parental Tenderness{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\iQ07 Precious Death{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\bl*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 PARENTAL TENDERNESS\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "I will be a father unto you."\emdash 2 Cor. 6:18.\par \par "As one whom his mother comforts."\emdash Isaiah 66:13.\par \par "As an eagle stirs up her nest, flutters over her young, spreads abroad her wings, takes them, bears them on her wings: so the Lord alone led him."\emdash Deut. 32:11, 12.\par \par Three gleams from the Pillar of Fire! A triple emblem and relationship of earth is taken to set forth the paternal love and tenderness of God\emdash dealing as a Father; comforting as a Mother; and then is added a figure very subordinate in itself, but still beautiful and touching\emdash a figure surely appropriate here as associated with the "Wilderness of the Wandering"\emdash the eagle of its rocky heights.\par \par The latter words, indeed, form a part of the great leader's own retrospect of the Divine dealing. Jehovah is likened by him to the mother eagle teaching her young brood to fly; alluring them from their eyrie to try their wings, watching their first feeble efforts, hovering over them, ready, if need be, to dart underneath and bear them on her stronger pinions.\par \par Our present brief meditation then, is Israel, and the Israel of the desert of all ages\emdash subjects of a most gracious discipline and training: guided, supported, safeguarded, by the Eagle-wing of God.\par \par God's Parental Love\emdash the heavenly Fatherhood\emdash is surely a theme of themes in the midst of trial. Earth's most sacred relation has its archetype in the Divine. A father's or mother's tenderest thoughts are centered in their weak and suffering child. The strong and vigorous of the family are left to care for themselves. It is the fragile flower, bent with hurricane and storm, that engrosses deepest affection and sympathy. So is it with our Father in heaven. It is the child of sorrow on whom He chiefly lavishes His regards. It was the "sick one" whom "Jesus loved." He took the blind man "by the hand." He was "moved with compassion" when He met the funeral crowd, and spoke words of solace and condolence to the bereft widow. At the sight of His own deeply afflicted mother He forgot for the moment His own pangs. His last deed and word was to dry her tears and provide for her a home (John 19:26). The Shepherd in the parable left the ninety-nine which were safely folded. He deemed it unnecessary to keep watch and ward over them. It was for the footsore and weary wanderer, away up amid the thorny brakes and jagged rocks, that he subjected Himself to toil and peril. "I will search for my lost ones who strayed away, and I will bring them safely home again. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak. I will make a covenant of peace with them and drive away the dangerous animals from the land. Then my people will be able to camp safely in the wildest places and sleep in the woods without fear." (Ezek. 34:16, 25).\par \par Reader\emdash in the midst, it may be, of mysterious dealings\emdash dismissing all servile fear, delight to think of this (paradoxical as the words we have often repeated in these pages may appear), "Whom the Lord loves He chastens." "What son is he whom the Father chastens not?" Chastisement\emdash the family badge\emdash the family pledge\emdash the family privilege. Delight to dwell on that great, that greatest revelation of Christ. The saying may be taken as the brightest emanation from the Fiery Pillar\emdash "My Father and your Father; My God, and your God."\par \par My Father! It was the soothing balm mixed in the Redeemer's own cup in Gethsemane. "This cup which My Father gives Me to drink, shall I not drink it?" My Father! it is the one name which fetches back the prodigal and sings him home. So in seasons of severest discipline, submission is best attained when chastisement puts the yearning prayer into heart and lip, "I will arise and go to my Father." "Even so, Father." My Father! it is the key which unlocks many perplexities in life. My Father! it is the lullaby which smooths the pillow of pain and soothes to sweetest rest. It is the requiem in the hour of death\emdash "Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit." Here is a filial prayer: go forth to the desert with it on your lips; hear the response in your night of gloom and sadness\emdash\par "The way is dark, my Father! Cloud on cloud\par Is gathering thickly over my head, and loud\par The thunders roar above me. See, I stand\par Like one bewildered! Father, take my hand.\par \par "The way is dark, my child; but leads to light;\par I would not have you always walk by sight;\par My dealings now you can not understand,\par I meant it so; but I will take your hand.\par \par "The way is long, my Father! and my soul\par Longs for the rest and quiet of the goal.\par While yet I journey through this weary land,\par Keep me from murmuring; Father, take my hand.\par \par "The way is long, my child! but it shall be\par Not one step longer than is best for thee;\par And you shall know at last, when you shall stand\par Safe at the end, how I did take your hand."\par \par Reader, with the hand of a Father-God in yours, and yours in His, rejoice in the double assurance, alike under the shadow of the Pillar of cloud and the gleam of the Pillar of fire\emdash "You compass my path" (in the daytime), "and my lying down" (the vigils of night). Implicitly rely on the methods of His guidance. His one object in all is to bring you nearer to Himself; and even if there be the removal of prized blessings, be assured there is a "needs-be." "You may accuse me," says the Duchess de Gontaut, in her impressive Memoirs, "of making too light of all vicissitudes. You would be wrong. God has simply endowed me with the faculty of making the best of His severest inflictions: and I believe this to be the surest proof of real faith and the only way of living through life without repining."\par \par Oh for the trust and ready implicit submission of the Father of the Faithful, of whom it is said, "he rose up early in the morning"; as if eager to fulfill, be what it might, the bidding of his God! Instead of murmuring at the slow lifting of the cross, seek to bear meekly your mystery of pain or of sorrow. We are apt to be hasty and impatient; to marvel at protracted suffering and baffled hopes. All God's dealings are slow. An earthly father's education of his child is necessarily gradual and prolonged. The child feels the slowness. There are tears shed over hard tasks, and restlessness under what appears redundant toil and effort. But there is wise discipline in all these mental and moral struggles. Our Heavenly Father has the same end in view\emdash "He, for our profit"\emdash "Then do we with patience wait for it." Let every murmur be suppressed with the Master's words, "If you (earthly fathers), being evil (imperfect\emdash often erring), know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him?" (Matt. 7:11).\par \par It is difficult\emdash almost impossible\emdash often to own all this\emdash to see wisdom and love, "good things," in what seem strange, regarded as paternal dealings. But ever fall back on the truth that the best and noblest lives have been molded by affliction: the purest gold is brought forth from the refining process in the furnace. It was the alabaster vase in New Testament story, shattered and broken, that yielded precious ointment and diffused sweetest fragrance. How many of God's afflicted family can give the attestation\emdash It was trial that braced me for duty and service. Trial was the training school where I was disciplined as a soldier in the use of spiritual weapons: taught how to put on "the whole armor of God" that I might be able to stand in the evil day, and having done all to stand. "It was good for me that I was so afflicted, for before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep Your word!" The homestead has been pillaged, but the pillaging of the earthly nest has driven me to the wing and to heavenly soarings. As it is the famine, and crippled resources, which form the main impelling motives of the emigrant to seek other climates and shores, so it is affliction which often colonizes the spiritual kingdom.\par \par Trust parental love. In words suggested by one of our motto-symbols\emdash\par "Let Your angel-wings be spread\par O'er me; keep me close to Thee:\par In the peace Your love does shed\par Let me dwell eternally!"\par \par "What," says Bishop Hall, "if property, credit, health, friends, and relatives were all lost; you have a Father in heaven." And if these fatherly dealings are not at the time apparent\emdash if the writings be now blotted, undecipherable; rather, if we in our infancy are only spelling out our Father's mysterious words\emdash the meaning strange\emdash the time will come, when all shall be made plain; erasures restored; light supplied; involved passages interpreted. Many a needed translation of what has been long to us like a foreign language, will be rendered in "Heaven's Vernacular," the motto on every title-page of the volumes\emdash too often blurred and faded now, made luminous then\emdash "like as a father pities his children."\par \par It is said of the seventy translators of the Old Testament into Greek (the Septuagint), who were shut up to accomplish their task by one of the Ptolemies in the Island of Pharos, that though each occupied a separate apartment, on issuing forth from their seclusion, the translations were to a word identical. It will be so in Heaven with God's translated Providences. However diverse may be the rendering at times here, there will be no divergence from the united testimony in that true "Land of LIGHT"\emdash "He has done all things well" (Mark 7:37). "For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away\'85Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face" (1 Cor. 13:9, 10, 12).\par \par "Leaflets, now unpaged and scattered,\par Time's great library receives;\par When Eternity shall bind them,\par Golden volumes we shall find them,\par God's light falling on the leaves."\par \par Yes, His ways may be past finding out; but confident that there are blessings in reserve for us, blessings in disguise, surrender yourself to His wiser, better guidance, with faith's impassioned prayer, "Bless me, even me also, O my Father!" The response will in due time come. It is already yours\emdash the Pillar-flash lights up the barren wilderness\emdash "I will be a father unto you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord almighty."\par \cf1\fs23\par } fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 ABOUNDING GRACE\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "My grace is sufficient for you; for My strength is made perfect in weakness."\emdash 2 Cor. 12:9.\par \par "And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work."\emdash 2 Cor. 9:8.\par \par What could we do, in the midst of the thick darkness of trial, but for the sustaining grace of Christ? Like the great Apostle, who tells his experience in our first motto-verse, we plead with God for the removal of some affliction\emdash "the thorn in the flesh sent to buffet us" (12:7). The prayer is answered, the support is given; but not in the way we asked for, or expected. The lacerating spur is still left\emdash the trial or bereavement, whatever it be, is permitted to continue. The God, however, who sent the trial\emdash yes, who sent the trial\emdash for observe the special word of the Apostle, "there was given me a thorn in the flesh" (v. 7)\emdash He who appointed the trial and still retains it, bestows what HE deems preferable. He imparts compensating grace enabling us to endure the thorn.\par \par To borrow an illustration from the name of our volume; the Israelites, soon after the commencement of the desert march, gave vent to bitter complaint. Their cry was to be delivered from a prolonged wilderness journey, to terminate days of scorching heat and nights of chill and darkness. 'Remove the thorn. Take us back, either to the waters and palm-groves of Egypt; or else, by some easier and shorter route, conduct us to the Land of Promise.' God answers their prayer; but not as they would have desired. He continues the long, lonely, dreary road for the space of forty years. But He bestows the better equivalent, not for their good only, but to be a spiritual lesson for His Church in all coming ages. He gives the symbol and pledge of His own immediate presence. He spreads over their camp a canopy of cloud by day. He lights up a pillar of fire by night. He would teach them the far higher truth of realizing their dependence on Him. Weak, wavering, helpless in themselves, at the mercy of a thousand hostile forces and influences, (inhospitable nature combined with the assaults of desert foes,)\emdash "He led forth His own people like sheep, and guided them in the wilderness like a flock. He commanded the skies above, and opened the doors of heaven. He rained down manna upon them to eat, and gave them of the bread of heaven. \'85Man did eat angels' food" (Psalm 78:52, 23, 24, 25, R.V.). In other words, the answer to their importunate pleadings was given in the language of our New Testament assurance, "My grace is sufficient for you: for My strength is made perfect in weakness."\par \par All this is suggestive, also, of severest affliction. The Apostle's emblem points to trial in its acutest form. Those who have traveled in Eastern lands know what "the thorn" is. Paul could fetch his figure from early memories by the banks of the Cydnus river, and the Tarsus Valley, as well as from many subsequent scenes of travel where the same tree was abundant. Very different is it from what is familiar to us at home. The spikes, at once larger and stronger, always recalled to the present writer what must have been the anguish of that thorny crown which circled the brow of the Man of Sorrows. Indeed the original word may, according to some, imply the intenser form of suffering which points to those stakes or iron prongs employed at times by barbarous conquerors to mangle the bodies of the vanquished (R.V. margin).\par \par Afflicted one, your present trial may in no figurative, but very real sense, be one of exceptional severity: the iron may have entered into your soul. God's method of dealing is still the same as with Paul. The Shepherd of Israel, who "led Joseph like a flock," has some great end in view in the sending and continuance of the lacerating thorn. He designs life to be a scene and season of discipline. The word more than once translated in the Epistles "judgment" really means "training," "education." He is educating you in His school, as He did Israel under the sheen of the Pillar. His dealings\emdash the acutest and most mysterious, are not arbitrary\emdash not capricious. He knows what is best. "The sufferings from which He could not deliver us He has transfigured for us. They are no longer penal, but remedial and penitential. Pain has become the chastisement of a Father who loves us: and Death the passage into His very presence" (Lyttleton).\par \par The thorn which you would sincerely remove He sees fit to continue; the somber cloud in which He enfolds you, He delays or refuses to rim with the silver lining. "I will give you," says He, "better than the removal of either thorn or cloud: 'Strengthen those who have tired hands, and encourage those who have weak knees. Say to those who are afraid, "Be strong, and do not fear, for your God is coming to destroy your enemies. He is coming to save you. The lame will leap like a deer, and those who cannot speak will shout and sing! Springs will gush forth in the wilderness, and streams will water the desert. The parched ground will become a pool, and springs of water will satisfy the thirsty land. Marsh grass and reeds and rushes will flourish where desert jackals once lived.' (Isaiah 35:3, 4, 6, 7).\par \par He knows you too well, He loves you too well, to give the nest without the thorn. That very discipline begets trust. Like Alpine travelers we grope our way tremulously along the yawning crevasse and rugged terrain, and through the misty darkness. But His purpose and design is that we may be led to cling only more unfalteringly to the hand of the wise, unerring Guide, and to feel that He is equal to all emergencies. The wilderness is dark: but the darkness only brings into brighter contrast the beacon-glory of the Pillar. The good poet, lately departed, seems, in his "Light to be felt," to write under its gleam\emdash\par "We older children grope our way\par From dark behind to dark before:\par And only when our hands we lay,\par Dear Lord, in Yours, the night is day,\par And there is darkness nevermore.\par \par "Reach downwards to the sunless days,\par Where human guides are blind as we,\par And faith is small and hope delays;\par O Take the hands of prayer we raise,\par And let us feel the Light of Thee!"\par \par Bunyan's Pilgrim trembled as he passed with dripping garments through the Slough of Despond. But why his plight? It was because he saw not, or, for the moment refused to see and to use the stepping stones close by, provided by the King of the Way. So are we guilty too often of disregarding the stepping stones of God's Promises. We plunge, in our despondency, into "the miry clay," when He would set our feet upon the solid Rock.\par \par Then, further, ponder our companion motto-verse with its wealth of provision and promise\emdash "all grace"\emdash "abounding"\emdash "all-sufficiency"\emdash "sufficiency in all things." "What an illimitable balance," to use an old writer's comment on the words, "have we here, in the bank of heaven!" What a sure pledge that, as the Shepherd of Israel, He will keep sleepless "watch over the flock by night"\emdash never leave the shorn lamb to the untempered winds of trial, or allow His faithfulness to fail. He afflicts "in measure": not imposing on His people burdens too heavy to carry. "But remember that the temptations that come into your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will keep the temptation from becoming so strong that you can't stand up against it. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you will not give in to it." (1 Cor. 10:13, R.V.). "For myself," says one whose saintliness has stirred the pulses of the century, "now, at the end of a long life, I say from a full heart that God has never failed me; never disappointed me; has ever turned evil into good for me\'85and what He has been to me who have deserved His love so little, such He will be, I believe and know, to every one who does not repel Him, and turn from His pleadings."\par \par Do not misinterpret or misunderstand the way in which the promised grace is given. It does not come with a torrent, in rain-floods or water-floods. Submission is evolved gradually. As with the prophet of old, we often cannot all at once recognize spiritual helps and supports, or we refuse to do so. The evening star glimmers at first imperceptibly in the twilight. Our fields, at first, only show patches of struggling verdure. So also with resignation, the pre-eminent grace in trial, "Nevertheless, afterward," (Heb. 12:11), like the after-glow of Egypt with which the Israelites were so familiar, is God's principle and method. Not all at once, with impetuous rush, is the stranded vessel moved. But as wave after wave comes rolling in, the inert mass seems to wake up to the sound of many waters. Gradually the conquest is made; and in due time, with white wings outspread, she is once more buoyant on summer seas. Thus is it with the wave of God's love in a time of affliction. The agitated, shattered, stranded heart is gradually swayed by an influence above. In this, as in other things, "he that believes shall not make haste."\par \par Reader, God, in His infinite, mysterious wisdom, has seen fit to touch you in your tenderest part. The world is changed to you. You have, indeed, the same old environments. You feel yourself plodding on in the old mechanical way: life and its exacting duties cannot be evaded. But, Ichabod! its glory has departed. Yes, true, and yet not true. If your sun has gone down in the darkness of bereavement and death, that is the time for the lighting of the Pillar and for the bright unfoldings of grace.\par \par "I lay, with heaven's cold night above,\par Upon a couch of stone;\par I said, 'O Lord, if You are love\par Why am I left alone?'\par And there I heard the answer fall,\par 'My love itself is all in all.'"\emdash Sacred Songs.\par \par His end is surely a noble and elevated one, "if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together" (Rom. 8:17). "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." "Works." The great Workman with the tools of affliction sifts the quartz and debris and dross, in order to get the grains of gold which are subsequently fashioned into "the crown of glory that fades not away." Trial is the golden rod measuring the wall of the New Jerusalem. Trial is the golden gate leading into its eternal Temple. Trial is the means\emdash the chief means\emdash employed in assimilating the soul to God, and imprinting on it the Divine lineaments. "This honor have all His saints" (Psalm 149:9). "Most gladly, therefore," says Paul (2 Cor. 12:9), speaking of his unremoved thorn, and borrowing also a metaphor from the desert Pillar with its cloudy curtain-canopy\emdash "will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may (literally) spread its tabernacle over me" (R.V. margin).\par \par "To be made with You one in spirit,\par Is the boon that I lingering ask;\par To have no bar 'twixt my soul and Thine;\par My thoughts to echo Your will Divine:\par Myself Your servant for any task."\emdash L. Larcom.\par \par "When He has tried me I shall come forth as gold" (Job 23:10).\par \par "But the god of all grace, who has called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that you have suffered a while, make you perfect, establish, strengthen, settle you " (1 Peter 5:10).\par \cf1\fs23\par } ir sorrows."\emdash Exod. 3: 7.\par \par "In the world you shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."\emdash John 16:33.\par \par He suffered! Sorrowing one, what a gleam of the Pillar-cloud is this!\par \par He suffered! What are all your most agonizing afflictions compared with what He endured for You!\par \par He suffered\emdash poverty, weariness, privation, hunger, thirst, grief, and the minor other ills that flesh is heir to. These, however, were but the surface-heavings of the deeper depths of woe\emdash the assaults of men and the malignity of devils, cruel innuendoes, savage indignities; the loss or desertion of beloved friends; the treachery of trusted associates: that, also, in the case of a nature sensitively strung alike physically and spiritually. "Reproach," said He, "has broken My heart."\par \par He suffered more profoundly still. There was a mystery of anguish in Gethsemane which mortal tongue cannot tell, or imagination conceive. No wonder it is described with an emphasis belonging to no other\emdash "THE Agony." Its undefined dreadfulness is worded in the Greek Litany by "Your sufferings known and unknown." What mean these drops of blood oozing from His brow? What means the thrice-uttered prayer, in a paroxysm of woe, "Let this cup pass from Me"? (Matt. 26:39). What means the climax and consummation of all, when the very sun, in the words of Jeremy Taylor, "put on sackcloth, as if ashamed to confront the spectacle of its expiring Creator": when the wail was evoked from parched and dying lips\emdash the bitterest cry that ever rose from earth to heaven\emdash "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me"?\par \par He suffered. Of Him alone could the words be said\emdash "All Your waves and Your billows have gone over me." Well may He have addressed the question, first to His disciples and then to His suffering children of all ages\emdash "Can you drink of the cup which I drink of, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" With an intense pathos of which the afflicted patriarch knew nothing, He could make the appeal to a whole world of weepers, "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O you, my friends, for the hand of God has touched me!" (Job 19:21).\par \par He suffered. But the lesson from these sufferings for you and for me is to watch how, in this melancholy gloom, shone the Pillar of Fire! See His perfect and profound resignation! He takes the cup, whatever that mystic emblem may mean, with trembling hand. Humanity in its weakness, rather humanity in its very strength, utters an "If it be possible"\emdash the prayer of His suffering children still\emdash "let it pass." But it is only for the moment. The bitter chalice is drained to the dregs. Three times He recedes from the edge of the abyss and its "horror of great darkness." But it is a momentary recoil\emdash no more. He plunges in! Self-surrender, heroic obedience, unmurmuring submission can go no farther. His own will is now, as ever, submerged in the Divine\emdash "Not as I will, but as You will." He ceases not in the prolonged conflict until He could utter the cry waited for by all time, and which sends its prolonged echoes through eternity\emdash "It is finished!"\par \par Though we have selected the closing hour of all, He was, during the entire period of His earthly life, "the Faithful and True Martyr" (Rev. 1:5). Well may a writer speak of "the fascination of that mournful life-story, so infinite in its pathos and so profound in its wisdom, the most touching of scenes, and the most impressive of tragedies\'85the loving and gracious Man of Sorrows, listening to every plaint of weakness, and helping every troubled heart to bear its burden, even while on His own there rested the burden of a world's salvation" (Present Day Religion).\par \par Reader, I know not what the circumstances of your suffering are. More than probable they may be identical in kind, though not in degree, with those of your suffering Lord.\par \par (1) They may be physical. As was noted at greater length in a previous chapter, it is only those conversant with a couch of lingering pain who can testify to the reality. The sudden close of the windows, long open to the cheering light of day; the drawn blinds; the tossing from side to side in the hopeless battle with wakefulness\emdash opiates giving, at the best, transient moments of relief\emdash only to renew the pitiless struggle: "Saying in the morning, 'Would God it were evening!' and in the evening, 'Would God it were morning!'"\par \par That pain\emdash that physical pain\emdash on the Cross, He suffered! There were, as I have just said, other reasons of infinitely more tremendous significance which convulsed His soul. But one reason for His being subjected to the pangs of an agonized body, undoubtedly was, that He might impart to every child of anguish His own experimental exalted sympathy. In our hours of prostration, weakness, and weariness\emdash when in their prolonged vigils we may be tempted at times "to faint when we are rebuked of Him," the whisper trembling on parched lips\emdash "Why all this discipline of pain? Why this cruel cross to bear? Where is the wisdom? Where is the love?"\emdash we may think of a Divine fellow-sufferer subjected without any mitigation\emdash (for the very anodyne offered was refused)\emdash to the intensest bodily torture. "Consider Him that endured\'85lest you be weary and faint in your minds" (Heb. 12:3).\par \par (2) Your sufferings may be mental. Harassment, unkindness, ingratitude, the barbed shafts of malice and slander, all the more grievous to bear if sent winged from the quiver of a friend. It may be anxiety about a beloved relative, the subject of slow disease, around whose couch the too ominous shadows are gathering\emdash "life balanced in a breath." It may be the agony of bereavement, when the long alternations of hope and fear have ended\emdash the vacant niche in your heart\emdash the vacant chair in your home\emdash the cherished name on the gravestone. Or, it may be, in your own case, wasting disease too surely pointing to the fatal termination\emdash this involving the severance of holiest ties, and leaving dear ones solitary and alone to do battle with adversity. These and many such, though varying in their outer form and complexion, your great suffering Master knew in their fullest measure. Yes, inclusive of the last-mentioned; when, Himself racked in agony, He had that agony intensified by the sight of a fond mother jostled amid the crowd that surged around, and made sport of His dying moments; the sword too truly piercing her own heart, as the nails were lacerating the Body at whose feet she crouched.\par \par The refrain of the present meditation is, He suffered; and because He suffered, says the Apostle in our motto-verse, "He is able to support." We have quoted more than once, as suggested by the name of this book, the words which emanated from the Jehovah of the Pillar-cloud, the opening syllables in that drama of the Exodus and the desert; let them be repeated in their most appropriate form here: "I have seen, I have seen the affliction of My people, for I know their sorrows." His whole life, from Bethlehem's manger to Calvary's cross, formed an empathetic commentary and fulfillment. He knew\emdash He knows, every heart-throb of His suffering Israel in every age. He is no god or demi-god of Pagan mythology, who lives in unsympathetic isolation amid the clouds of Olympus, all in ignorance of the travail of a sin-stricken, woe-worn world. From deepest experience He is cognizant of every pang that rends the soul. If one of earth's kingdoms is the Kingdom of Sorrow, He is its King. The crown on His head was a crown of thorns, and, being so, the scepter in His hand is the scepter of kingly sympathy.\par \par It is recorded of Alexander the Great, that he touched with his crown a wounded soldier in the ranks, and that at the touch there were the tinglings of new life. It is so in a diviner, heavenly sense. Christ touches our wounds with His double crown\emdash the crown of thorns as the Human Sympathizer, and the crown of glory as Head over all. It is the thorn-crown which forms the special theme of our present meditation. I always like the conjunction of the two clauses in the familiar Litany\emdash "Pitifully behold the sorrows of our hearts\'85O Son of David, have mercy upon us!" It was the Lord of the Pillar-cloud, the God-Man, of whom it is touchingly said, "So He was their Savior. In all their afflictions He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved them: in His love and in His pity He redeemed them, and He bore them, and carried them all the days of old" (Isaiah 63:8, 9). "It is Christ alone," beautifully says Pere Didon, in his Life of Jesus, "who teaches the joy of suffering, because it is He alone who pours into the soul a Divine life which no pain can overwhelm; which trial only strengthens, and which can despise death, because it permits us to face it with the fullness of immortal hope."\par \par My brother, trust this Great Sympathizer, "who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross." Conquer as He conquered, by a noble submission and self-surrender to the will of your Father in heaven. While you take trial for granted as a part of His appointed discipline, hear the Lord of sorrow encouraging you from His own example and victory\emdash "In the world you shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."\par \par We read of Him that "being in an agony He prayed the more earnestly." "Who in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard (as it has been rendered) because of His reverent submission" (Heb. 5:7). Is not that saying impressive\emdash "He became obedient unto death"? It was a gradual effort requiring Divine self-sacrifice. But it was given, and the triumph was assured. Let this, also, afflicted one, be the sanctified result, in your case, of the Cup which the same Father has put into your hands. "Be more courageous," are the words of Francis de Sales, "in your trials, cherish them carefully, and thank God for vouchsafing to give you ever so small a share in His dear Son's cross."\par \par "Rejoice inasmuch as you are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that when his glory shall be revealed, you may be glad also with exceeding joy."\par \cf1\fs23\par } gg= m10 The Great Sympathizer{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 THE GREAT SYMPATHIZER\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "For in that He Himself has suffered being tempted, He is able to support those who are tempted."\emdash Heb. 2:18.\par \par "I know theS AND STRANGERS\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "And confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one; therefore God is not ashamed to he called their God for He has prepared a City for them."\emdash Heb. 11:13, 16.\par \par Though really spoken of the older patriarchs, these verses would seem as if uttered under the gleam of the Pillar-cloud. They might have formed the refrain in the Song of Israel for forty years in their desert.\par \par "Pilgrims and strangers on the earth!" This opening clause, applicable to believers in all ages, is no morbid sentiment. The Christian is not a pessimist. God's child, pilgrim and wayfarer though he be, has bright experiences in "the house of his pilgrimage." He comes to Zion, not with dirges, but with songs. "Those who have been ransomed by the Lord will return to Jerusalem, singing songs of everlasting joy. Sorrow and mourning will disappear, and they will be overcome with joy and gladness." (Isaiah 35:10). He is feelingly alive to the wealth of loveliness in the surrounding world. It belies the name often given to it of "Valley of Tears." None more than he, none so truly as he, in the contemplation of the glowing skies by day and the silver galaxy by night,\par "Can lift to Heaven an unpresumptuous eye,\par And smiling say, My Father made them all."\par \par And yet it is not inconsistency to affirm\emdash it would be vain to deny, that in the hour of sorrow all undergoes a gloomy transformation. Affliction has its exceptional teachings. God's fair earth then seen through tearful eyes, is draped in sadness. It wears not bridal attire, but funeral clothes. And the lesson so reluctantly listened to in the day of prosperity, with its sunshine, is urged with irresistible power on the broken heart\emdash "I am a stranger with you, and a sojourner as all my fathers were!" The harp of a thousand strings is rendered tuneless\emdash the light of life goes out, like the stars fading from the sky.\par \par Job was no pessimist. On the contrary, his heart, in its normal condition, was full of brightness and thankfulness. Read his pathetic story. No eye had a keener relish for the grand and beautiful in nature. He revels in "the philosophy of the seasons." The keener were his sympathies, that he saw God's footsteps and felt God's touch, in all. But can we wonder that this "Prince of the East," dowered with the three best gifts\endash goodness, intellect, and piety, when stricken in soul and body, realized as he had never done before, that Time was "a walking shadow"; and that he is heard wailing out the monotone, "Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He comes forth like a flower, and is cut down: he flees also as a shadow, and continues not" (Job 14:1, 2). In a word, "he confessed that he was a stranger and pilgrim on the earth."\par \par The time indeed (and thank God for it) will come, must come, when the cloud is lifted; when you will even feel the reviving influences of nature and yield to the claim and attraction of human interests. But meanwhile, all is "sicklied over with the pale cast of thought." The way cannot be traversed with gleaming eye and elastic step when the staff and the beautiful rod are broken.\par \par It is, therefore, in no spirit of murmuring or rebellion, that we repeat the first entry in this meditation. Let us rather look at it as lighted up by the sanctity of the Pillar of Fire. Reader, in that ashen flame, God\emdash the God who has seen fit severely to chasten\emdash would lead you, it may be through tears of anguish and a rifled home, to confess your homelessness. But it would be a poor, unworthy result of family trial, were it simply to discover the blight that has passed over your being and surroundings. The passage which forms our theme does not confine itself to gazing on the cloud. It has a glorious counterpart. There is a rift in the sky, disclosing the blue eternities behind and beyond. The down-cast pilgrim when he most deeply realizes that he is but a pilgrim, is inspired with noble resolves\emdash stimulated with brighter prospects. The Song of the Night merges into a Song of Eternal Day. It is the grandest possible result of trial\emdash "But NOW (the sequence of affliction) they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one."\par \par Oh most blessed fruit and result of the Divine dealings! The sorrowing present not obscuring or shrouding, but only lending brightness and glory to the future! The wear and tear of life\emdash many petty cares it may be, wedded with far deeper sorrows\emdash unspoken trials, anxieties, and responsibilities previously unknown. "Hill Difficulties," which before had their arbors and hospices, now one toilsome ascent; rugged steep and treacherous hollow, bewildering mist and storm-cloud. It was but recently balmy seas, now it is winter with fog and snowstorm, needing anxious pilotage. Worst and saddest of all, the oppressive silence in the dark empty halls of grief. "One there is not," rings dolefully at every turn. What you thought to be a fixed star is changed into meteor-gleam, vanished as a morning cloud, or like the bubble on the ocean. Yes, let none cynically deny you your newly-appropriated name, "Pilgrims and strangers." They can see no wilderness, because they have still their unshattered tents and camp fires, and undiminished circle to surround them. Can it be wondered at that the song of their encampment can get no response in yours?\par \par Turn, however, now, your contemplation to the reverse side. If bereavement and death have read their own impressive homily, there is a contrasted view to those afflictions which "for the present are not joyous but grievous." God's end and the soul's good is attained, if the breaking up of the temporary desert home quickens the onward march; lip and heart attuned to the resolve, "Now we desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one!" But for that trial, you might have forgotten that the wilderness was not your final rest or portion. You might otherwise have permitted fond fibers of affection to root you to earth. You might have continued in the pursuit of tinted air-bubbles\emdash like one of Bunyan's well-known characters in his dream, preferring feathers and dust to the beckoning angel and the gleaming crown\emdash dimming your eye to "the Better Country."\par \par God has, in mercy, shut out the garish noontide, and lighted up His own fiery column with its own golden splendor. He has illuminated it with the words which you can turn, in all time to come, into a pilgrim chant\emdash a "song of degrees," like one of those used by the Jews in going up to their greatest Feast, "God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them." Your affliction has brought Heaven nearer. It has served to wean from the too alluring fascinations of the present. It has forged adamantine chains to link you to the unseen and eternal. If some who read these pages can tell of successive bereavements\emdash they have peopled the once strange, silent, solitary Land with living souls. Angels and glorified spirits seem to wave signals of welcome. It has made the other world more of a home than this\emdash\par "We dream awhile that Home is Heaven;\par We learn at last that Heaven is Home."\par \par Happy those who can thus join the two correlated Bible sentences, "Pilgrims and strangers on the earth," "Our Citizenship is in Heaven" (Phil. 3:20); who can listen under desert skies to words of heart-cheer, "Upwards, Onwards, Heavenwards, Homewards!" I like the words in the Revised Version of 2 Cor. 5:8, "We are of good courage, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord."\par \par In heathen mythology (the legend is one of the oldest of Greek antiquity), Prometheus, represented by Aeschylus "as an immortal god and friend of the human race\emdash willing to sacrifice himself for their salvation," was said to bring down two gifts from heaven\emdash that is, Fire and Hope. In an infinitely more real sense, as our double motto-verse unfolds, the true Prometheus\emdash the Son of the Highest\emdash Himself the Divine Sacrifice, "brought down FIRE for the Pillar-cloud in the night of earth." Along with this He has brought HOPE, "the hope full of immortality,"\emdash the promised bliss of that world where darkness is changed to light and hope to full fruition\emdash where the winter is forever past, the rain over and gone, nothing left but eternal summer for the soul.\par \par Pilgrim of sorrow, recognize your afflictions to be ladder-steps to help you in reaching the Gate of the City. It was the beautiful saying of young Prince Otto, who endured with such heroic Christian fortitude\emdash "More than we can bear is not sent us; and when we can bear no longer, the end comes, and we are blest in heaven." Yes, "more than we can bear is not sent us." Whatever is sent, in the way of pain and suffering and bereavement, is God's needed discipline\emdash God's best discipline. The gifts and graces of the Christian have ever been nurtured thereby. To borrow the words of a friend, "In the garden of sorrow the soul's loveliest passion-flowers reach their ideal perfection." The noblest heroes and heroines of the Faith have been braced by "great tribulation." It is often the bruised reeds the Almighty converts into golden arrows for His quiver.\par \par Go, then, up and on through the wilderness leaning on your Beloved. Keep in sight the guiding night Pillar. Be loyal to God, as a son whom He chastens, and He will be faithful to the resigned and trusting heart. So may it be said of you, day by day, and never more than on the last day of all\emdash life's vesper bell ringing the words\emdash "There has sprung up a light for the righteous, and joyful gladness for such as are true-hearted."\par \cf1\fs23\par } g ee12 Light on the Morrow{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{ A q!11 Pilgrims and Strangers{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 PILGRIM \f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 LIGHT ON THE MORROW\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow."\emdash Matt. 6:34.\par \par "Commit your way unto the Lord."\emdash Psalm 37:5.\par \par Here is a double voice from the Pillar-cloud, in the midst of your night of sorrow.\par \par Li ke most trials, I shall suppose that the present one has suddenly overtaken you. An unexpected bolt has descended; some silver chord has suddenly been loosed; some golden bowl irreparably broken. You can say of your grief as a true sufferer has simply described it: "It lies down with us at night. It rises with us in the morning." You feel at once out on the stormy billows, away from the harbor where all so lately was peace. You ask, in your first hour of bewilderment, can it really be so; that the fond vi sion of years has departed like a scroll; the favorite life-chord snapped? "Suddenly are my tents spoiled and my curtains in a moment," (Jer. 4:20)\emdash those gone in the twinkling of an eye for "the forever of time," who, using the words of a distinguished scholar, "in old days it was strength to be with, and for the future it will be strength to remember" (Westcott). But it is, alas! this very future which is now, all unexpectedly, the perplexing and pathetic anticipation. Must the light of the Pillar -cloud here be sought for in vain? With these dense impalpable shadows projected without warning on your path, is your only outlook, voiceless solitude\emdash the gloom of the desert by night or its mocking mirage by day; beguiling you into false confidences and disappointing hopes?\par \par "Leave," says Christ, "that tomorrow with Me." "Take no needless, over-anxious thought, as the word means, about it. That tomorrow, under My hand, will reveal itself. Instead of trying vainly in this "hurricane eclipse" to forecast the dusty, travel-stained roads of life\emdash "Commit your way unto the Lord; trust also in Him; and He shall bring it to pass. And He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your judgment as the noonday. Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him" (Psalm 37:5, 6, 7).\par \par Reader, do not suppose that nervous, anxious apprehensions about the future, or wonderment at the mysterious dealings of God are in your case exceptional. You remember, how, in a different form, they were experienced and avowed by the typical "Pilgrims of the Night,"\emdash the Hebrew host at the very commencement of their Exodus. Not only was it with them mystery and enigma, but the almost certainty of disaster, appalling in its suddenness, "They are entangled in the land, the wilderness has shut them in!" "Surely You did set them in slippery places: You cast them down into destruction. How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment! They are utterly consumed with terrors" (Psalm 73:18, 19). Even their faithful commander was terror-struck. The column of flame was deflected from what appeared the right way\emdash leading to panic and peril\emdash the barrier mountains behind, and the raging sea in front. There was nothing but misgiving for the present, and tremulousness for the future. Falling prone to the ground, Moses wails out his plaint and remonstrance.\par \par But the God of the covenant host knew better. Accordingly, He answers only in words of righteous rebuke, "Why do you lie on your face? Tell the children of Israel to go forward." "Commit," as if He said, "that unknown road and unrevealed tomorrow to Me; I the Lord will go before you; I the God of Israel will be your reward." "Forward," was the word of command, as the no longer sceptic leader anew grasped his rod and rose in the might of Jehovah. If not then, the day would come in long after years, when the memorial song would be sung, "He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation. Oh that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men" (Psalm 107:7, 8).\par \par Confide in that same assurance. The tomorrow may doubtless to you, also, be all perplexity. Like a group of desert travelers of a future age\emdash like the Magi, you may seem suddenly to have lost your guiding star. But, Jehovah-Jireh! (the Lord will provide.) Seek to rise above these unworthy morbid forebodings. It is the nature of faith\emdash the triumph of faith\emdash to overcome difficulties, to feel assured that in due time the gloomiest cloud will be braided with silver linings.\par \par The disciples at the scene of Transfiguration at first "feared to enter the cloud." Before long when they passed through its enfoldings, the gloom and mystery were dispelled. "They looked unto Him and were lightened," for "His face shone as the Sun." His feet, as they were in an after day seen in Patmos by one of those privileged spectators, would seem "like pillars of fire." That glimpse of transfigured glory prepared them for the great impending suffering in Gethsemane and Calvary. They were braced under the shadow of the cloud for the fiery trials that were so soon to try them.\par \par Enter on your veiled future in a similar spirit\endash\par "Stoop not forever over sorrow's loom\par On webs of drear unprofitable gloom,\par Behold the text, writ with the Sun's last hand\par In crimson cipher on the golden sky,\par Proclaiming joyous tomorrow to the land:\par Then let the soul take comfort."\emdash After-Glow.\par \par God gives you in our older type of the Pillar, a similar pledge of safety and rest. He can bring good out of evil, and light out of darkness, and order out of confusion. He can transform the wilderness into an oasis fringed with palms and musical with fountains\emdash thus fulfilling in a better than its literal sense His own promise, "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose."\par \par One of the sweetest of our religious poets would almost seem to have had that "Light of fire" in view, as the lines were written\emdash\par "For one thing only, Lord, dear Lord, I plead,\par Lead me aright.\par Though strength should falter,\par and though heart should bleed,\par Through peace to light.\par I do not ask my cross to understand,\par My way to see\emdash\par Better in darkness just to feel Your hand,\par And follow Thee."\par \par How blessed, we may well add, that the future, so well known to Him, is unknown to us! What a pall would be cast on many a joyous life, had the power been given (so mercifully witholden) of foreknowing it! We are thus spared years of anticipated misery. Never was there a more gracious appointment and provision than that spoken of by James, "You don't know what shall happen tomorrow."\par \par "Accept the present with a thankful heart,\par Nor listen to the tramp of troublous years\par Remembered joy shall soothe, when sorrow's smart\par Turns your sweet past to tears."\par \par The best and highest thought of all is, that our "destinies,"\emdash our present\emdash and above all, our future and its unborn hours are "God-appointed." When from His lips the question is propounded, "Is it well with you?" (that question to which the faithless heart is ever tempted to give an evasive answer)\emdash be it yours, confident in the combined wisdom and love of your Leader, to respond, "It is well!"\emdash glorifying Him by meek submission and faithful following. "Shall we presumptuously cross His path? or shall we, like well disciplined soldiers, keep our post and watch for the signals?" (Newman). With the change of a word, let us strive to say\emdash\par "I do not ask to see\par The unveiling of Your purpose, or the shining\par Of future light on mysteries untwining,\par Your promise-roll is all my own,\par Your Pillar enough for me."\par \par Chequered though your way may be, He will be at every turning point\emdash soothing adversity\emdash tempering prosperity. And when that tomorrow shall itself come to an end, death will be but as a short summer's night pearled with clouds, a momentary overcasting of the heavens\emdash no more. Life's retrospect will evoke the Angel-Song of Bethlehem, "Glory to God!" Then the light, not of wilderness pillar, but of unsetting suns, "the light that never was on land or sea," will illuminate an endless tomorrow.\par \par With this glorious prospect, mourner, you may now sing, even it may be amid present blinding grief, one of the inspired "restful rhythms"\emdash "Yet I am always with You. You hold me by my right hand. You guide me with Your counsel, and afterward You will take me into glory!" Psalm 73:23-24\par \cf1\fs23\par }  "O Israel, how can you say the Lord does not see your troubles? How can you say God refuses to hear your case? Have you never heard or understood? Don't you know that the Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of all the earth? He never grows faint or weary. No one can measure the depths of his understanding."\emdash Isaiah 40:27, 28.\par \par "The Lord is good unto those who wait for Him, to the soul that seeks Him."\emdash Lam. 3:25.\par \par "O Israel, how can you say the Lord does not see your troubles? How can you say God refuses to hear your case?" Strong, impassioned as are these words, how truthfully they interpret the thoughts of many a sorrowing heart! Yes, of many a Christian heart. For, observe, the tender reproach and admonition is not addressed to the unbeliever, with his sceptic devil-born doubts; but to God's own covenant people\emdash "Israel." Disguise it as we may, in the depths of profound grief, and despite of all accepted dogmas and creeds, such reflections will obtrude themselves. "Has not God forgotten me? I adore Him and cling to Him as my Heavenly Father\emdash it is the assurance I shall be the last to surrender. But why this terrible trial? Where are any footprints of His love? I fail to hear even the faintest tones of the voice from the cloudy Pillar. Life is bereft of its beauty and brightness, and I am called to tread the dreary corridors of death, wedded to sepulchral silence. My prayers are apparently unheard. They only seem to lead from darkness to darkness. Surely He is, like Baal, asleep, leaving me to cry unsupported in the lonely desert\emdash My soul thirsts for You, in a dry and weary land, where there is no water."\par \par In vain I make my appeal to the God of the Fiery Column. In vain I plead the memories of the old pilgrim march\emdash "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord!\'85Are you not the One who dries up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass  over?" (Isaiah 51:9, 11). I call in the anguish and desertion of despair, "Keep not silence, O God. Hold not Your peace, and be not still, O God!" (Psalm 83:1).\par \par These, sorrowing one, in your seasons of despondency\emdash it may be even now\emdash are the tones of your muffled harp. Like the Syrophenician woman you eagerly follow the steps of the Great Helper\emdash seeking deliverance from Him who alone can give it. You can, as little as she did, understand the strange silence, the unhe!eded appeal, the apparent repulse. Is this like\emdash is it not rather sadly unlike His loving heart? "Surely my way is hidden from the Lord,"\emdash might well have been her agonizing soliloquy. But the tide of Divine-human sympathy was only for the time pent up and restrained. The sluices were before long withdrawn\emdash her trust was commended; her child restored. The word of the Gracious Consoler was a bequest for the importunate of all ages, "O woman, great is your faith; be it unto you even as you" will."\par \par Call to remembrance, child of affliction, a higher than any mere human experience. Christ could Himself enter into the mystery\emdash shall I say, the terribleness of apparently unheard and unsuccoured prayer. Read that psalm so unquestionably His own; the psalm of the Eloi-cry, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" His tearful pleadings were, "Why are You so far from the words of My roaring? O My God, I cry unto You in the daytime, but You hear not, and in the night seaso#n I am not silent!" What is His solace and balm-word in that hour of apparent desolation? He rests contented with the assurance, "But You are Holy" (Psalm 22:3).\par \par Think, in the midst of your crisis-hours with their silences of grief, how He traversed this, as well as other solitudes\emdash how He drank this, as well as other sorrow-brooks by the way (Psalm 110:7). Under the shade of these moonlit olives, the Master is giving utterance to importunate pleadings. But the cup is not allowed $to pass, and that, also, though "being in an agony, He prayed the more earnestly," "BUT, You are Holy." He will not surrender His confidence in God\emdash in His Heavenly Father's righteousness, faithfulness, and truth. At last, light breaks through the darkness; and before the Psalm of the Agony closes, He can tell the joyful experience, imparting help and hope and courage to all His people in their hours of misgiving\emdash "Snatch me from the lions' jaws, and from the horns of these wild oxen. The poor% will eat and be satisfied. All who seek the Lord will praise him. Their hearts will rejoice with everlasting joy." (Psalm 22:21, 26). The pathway of thorns is changed into that of triumph.\par \par Take courage from the example and experience of the Great Sufferer. Plead the promise of this same praying Savior, whose heart vibrates and throbs on the throne to the woes of humanity\emdash "Verily, verily I say unto you, Whatever you shall ask the Father in My name He will give it you." Only addin&g, as He did, "Nevertheless not as I will, but as You will."\par \par The great lesson He would teach His children is "Be patient." Let faith rise above the obscurations of sight and sense. This was the philosophy of affliction manifested in the case of the smitten patriarch of Uz. "Behold we count them happy who endure. You have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful and of tender mercy" (James 5:11). In the case of this much tried servant', the mysterious dealings came at last to be vindicated; and in anticipation he sang the song of victory on his bed of ashes\emdash "Though He slays me yet will I trust in Him." "For I know that my Redeemer lives!"\par \par Seek to imitate this creed of the Pilgrim Father. Chide your buffeted and baffled faith with the verse which heads this meditation, "Why say you, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel?" "Israel!" that is the tenderest word in the remonstrance, for it again recalls the wrestler in Peni(el\emdash the conflict all night long, which left a struggling wayfarer the triumphant "Soldier of God!" Hope on; trust on; fight on; pray on. Feel the calm assurance that "the prayer of faith shall save," and that, also, despite of thwarted purposes and apparently unanswered requests.\par \par The following words simply but truthfully describe the sorrowful\emdash the at times despairing yearnings of one who feels the mystery of unsupported pleadings; but who feels also, that these "silences," )rightly understood, have deep meanings, if not in most cases triumphant issues\emdash and alluring, at all events, to higher hopes, even though the way leads through shadow and darkness\emdash\par "Will not the baffled soul, dismayed,\par Fall prostrate in the dust?\par The expectant child-like heart, afraid,\par Forget its early trust?\par \par "They shall not be ashamed who wait,\par Are words that cannot fail.\par Blessed who linger at the* gate\par Until their suit prevail.\par \par "Forthwith, transfigured, smiles each sense\par Over which the darkness fell;\par The notes of praise swell dear and keen\emdash\par 'He does all things well.'"\par \par They are an echo of the more familiar words of the Laureate\emdash\par "The world's great Altar-Stairs,\par Which slope through darkness up to God."\par \par Not a few, doubtless, have personally experienced\emd+ash more likely have witnessed in others such notable results and triumphs. One aged mother in Israel, well known to the writer, never ceased for years, undeterred by adverse, almost hopeless influences, to plead, and plead, and plead again\emdash rising from her bed at night, in the darkness, to pursue her importunate suit. She refused to surrender the conviction that the answer would come. Though it tarried, she "waited for it." Come it did, in time to gladden her waning existence and to enable her on h,er own death-bed\emdash "the sleep of the beloved"\emdash to adore her faithful God as the Hearer and Answerer of prayer. Her experience for years might well have been that of our verse, "My way is hidden from the Lord, and my cause is passed over from my God." But she had "known and heard," and testified\emdash that "the everlasting God (the God of Eternity), the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, faints not, neither is weary."\par \par Reader, look and long for the assured gleams of t-his Pillar of Fire. "The Lord is good unto those who wait for Him, to the soul that seeks Him." He never said unto any of the seed of Jacob, "you seek My face in vain." Three times Christ prayed the prayer of His agony before He was heard. Three times Paul prayed the prayer for the removal of the buffeting thorn before he was heard. In both cases, at last, support was given, not in the way it was asked for (by removal), but an angel was sent from heaven to strengthen. You may be now like the Apostle on an.other occasion, in the dungeons of Philippi: your soul under scourging; your feet fast in the stocks\emdash the plaintive dirge on your lips, "Where is now my God?" But, as with him, "at midnight," the darkest hour of all, deliverance\emdash not perhaps as you expect it, will be given. The gracious though deferred accents will be heard\emdash "You called me in troubles, and I delivered you: and heard you what time as the storm fell upon you" (Psalm 81:7). Yes, following the Pillar\emdash peering for its light in the surrounding darkness, sooner or later the experience and the prayer of the desert Psalm will be your own: "They cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them out of their distresses. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke their bands in sunder. Oh, that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men!"\par \par "O house of Jacob, come and let us walk in the light of the Lord."\par \cf1\fs23\par }  e113 The Power of Prayer{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 THE POWER OF PRAYER\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par 1of the Glory-Pillar we have interpreted very specially, as the symbol of the Divine love. But we dare not restrict it to this. It is the emblem of the Divine holiness also. It was an opening strain in the closing song of Israel's great chief\emdash "A God of truth and without iniquity, just and righteous is He" (Deut. 32:4). And the same assertion is repeated in various forms throughout Scripture.\par \par Nor is it well, in the midst of these thoughts of comfort and solace, to forget this compl2ementary phase of affliction, that God\emdash yes, God, our Heavenly Father, appears to His pilgrim Israel now, as then, at times in the character of a punisher, with the fire of rebuke and chastisement. "Behold, My angel," says He, "Shall go before you: nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them" (Exod. 32:34). True, it is not the loftiest, it is not the consolatory view to take of His dealings. That gracious assurance of "Fatherhood" revolts at the thought of retributive suf3fering. In our seasons of deepest grief we cling to the revelation of the Divine Being with His repertory of golden promises, announcing earth's best symbol of love ("like as a Father") to be the parable and exponent of His own.\par \par Moreover, it would be doing injustice at once to God and His people\emdash it would be a misapprehension contradicted by the lips of a gracious Savior, to regard chastisement in the light the sterner Jews were disposed to do, as the invariable token of Divine di4spleasure (John 9:2, 3). But yet I feel convinced many a stricken one, conscious of sin\emdash it may be some special sin\emdash can acknowledge through tears: "I know that Your judgments are right, and that in faithfulness You have afflicted me." "Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight, that You might be justified when You speak, and be clear when You judge." "And David said unto God, I have sinned greatly in that I have done this thing: but now put away, I beseech You, th5e iniquity of Your servant. \'85And the Lord commanded the Angel, and he put up his sword again into the sheath thereof" (1 Chron. 21:8, 27).\par \par Often, also, there may be felt and owned some strange profound conformity between the sin and its chastisement, known only to the individual soul, as it whispers its unspoken griefs and accusings in the ear of Omniscience. The arrow which pierces and rankles may be feathered from our own bosoms. It may be some willful overt act of transgression. I6t may be the neglect and omission of some known duty. It may be siren voices of the world to which our traitor hearts have too readily, though gradually, responded, resulting in a wounding of the conscience, restraining prayer, grieving the Spirit: in a word, spiritual declension. He subjects in mercy\emdash yes, in mercy, to some sharp discipline, to rouse us from our perilous sleep. That is the rebuke and chastisement of love here spoken of. Self-humbled, self-accused, self-condemned, we utter the confe7ssion with tremulous lip and broken heart\emdash "Righteous are You, O Lord."\par \par Tried and suffering one, be comforted. I believe in this furnace of affliction\emdash the fire of Divine rebuke. But I believe, yet more, in the fire of purifying chastisement. Blessed is the man who owns the rectitude of the Great Chastiser, yet who regards all the Divine dealings, with their apparent severity\emdash wasting disease, blighted affections, withering disappointments, lacerating bereavements; onl8y (strange as may be the contradiction) as the tokens and pledges of a Father's love.\par \par The parent of the Parable, weeping over his penitent prodigal, is the Image of God. He tells you it is a furnace affliction, lighted, it may be, because of your sin. But He tells you, also, that He kindles it not to destroy but to refine. He Himself is seated by, tempering the fury of the flames; keeping the silver in the glowing heat just so long and no longer than is needed to purify\emdash to purge 9away the dross, and leave His own image reflected there\emdash "a vessel fit for the Master's use." One of the great master comforters of a past generation reminds us "it is where the rough waves roar, and the rattling shingle is tossed about, that we find the pebbles rounded and polished. So the Lord is shaping the storm-tossed life" (Guthrie). "In the same way," says another, "Christ deals with the white sapphire stone of His love, glistening with its hexagon star of light and the disciple's own name en:graved by His own hand as a keepsake of love. \'85The white stone is love's symbol. For in the old heraldry the sapphire always meant love. The ruby, which is only the red sapphire, earth's love. The commoner blue sapphire, heaven's love. The white sapphire, Christ's special love" (Lovell).\par \par Never let us forget God's object in affliction. It is to draw out new and hitherto unmanifested graces, especially the grace of silent unquestioning submission: the "peaceable fruits of righteousness; in those who are exercised thereby." To adopt a sentence written on a different subject, "The devout soul, in this process, may be likened to a sensitized plate, set in proper position under a starlit sky, which after due exposure is found marked by new stars, invisible to the naked eye, and beyond the farthest sweep of the unaided telescope" (Edinburgh Review).\par \par At times the remedial measures, which God sees and knows to be required, may involve the destruction of fond hopes and proud opes, spoils "the pride of life." But all to save and prevent irreparable spiritual loss. "The day of the Lord of Hosts is\'85on all pleasant pictures" (Isaiah 2:16). It is a strong expression to employ. I heard that great preacher, Henry Melvill, use it fifty years ago, and I have never forgotten it, as he spoke empathetically of a father laying child after child in the grave. "It broke his heart, but saved his soul!" Yes, emphasize the saying of our motto-verse, "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten." "Unto you it is given\emdash (a family badge, a covenant privilege) to suffer." It is with His own children He thus deals, "Whose fire is in Zion, and His furnace in Jerusalem" (Isaiah 31:9).\par \par O fire of the cloudy Pillar! come and search me, come and try me, come and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way! Great will be the blessedness of sorrows if such be the result.\par \par "And after the fire a still small voice."\par \cf1\fs23\par } >>y14 The Chastisement of Love{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 THE CHASTISEMENT OF LOVE\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten."\emdash Rev. 3:19\par \par "I rebuke." "I chasten." These are solemn assertions.\par \par The Fire 0A0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 LIGHT IN DARKNESS\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."\par \par "I will lead the blind down a new path, guiding them along an unfamiliar way. I will make the darkness bright before them and smooth out the road ahead of them. Yes, I will indeed do these things; I will not forsake them."\emdash Isaiah 42:16.\par \par B "What I do you know not now; but you shall know hereafter."\emdash John 13:7.\par \par A twin voice speaking from the Glory-Cloud. That Cloud, as of old, often conducts, as we have again and again noted, not by the short and easy way to the true Canaan, but through formidable leagues of desert. The cry of the fainting Hebrew host is repeated still: "We are entangled; the wilderness has shut us in." So great also, now and then, is the gloom, that with misgiving hearts we ask\emdash Can the teCstimony in our case, be indeed true\emdash "He led them ALL the night with a light of fire"? "O rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him." The luminous token, temporarily obscured, will in due time appear. He will subject you to no unnecessary peril, no needless circuitous road. Trust this promise; trust it in the dark; trust it when you fail to trace\emdash "I will lead the blind down a new path, guiding them along an unfamiliar way. I will make the darkness bright before them and smooth out the roadD ahead of them. Yes, I will indeed do these things; I will not forsake them."\par \par What a wondrous succession of wilderness watch-words! all crowned by the gracious assurance that HE "appoints all"; and that though the light of the Pillar-cloud may seem to us fitful and wavering, He does not, and will not, abandon His covenant Israel.\par \par It was but the other day I saw a picture of a blind man. The name\emdash the impressive title\emdash given to it by the artist, was "LightenE our darkness, O Lord!" The subject of the picture was reading from the raised letters of a Bible. A lamp was throwing its brightness on the reader's countenance, and on the hieroglyphics of the sacred page. God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, was then and there shining into his heart with the light of the knowledge of His own glory. The principal figure seemed from the reflected glow on the face to say, "And HE took the blind man by the hand and led him" (Mark 8:23). Here surely are suFggestively portrayed what the Lord does with our rayless souls in the gloom of blinding trial\emdash "If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me" (Psalm 139:11).\par \par I love the thought\emdash God the Leader of the blind; and in their very blindness interpreting His ways!\par \par Turn we now to the added motto-verse. We have spoken of it specifically in a previous page. But we may recur to it here as a New Testament parallel with the Old. G"What I do you know not now." The Divine Brother in our nature, about to expiate the sins of the world by laying down His own life, uttered the saying. The time He uttered it was that, when surely, beyond all others, an electric chord of sympathy was linking Him with universal suffering humanity. He could then and there, with a deeper intensity and pathos, use the declaration He made of old in the night of the Exodus\emdash "I know your sorrows." The same balm-word was whispered in this the most solemn crHisis of all time. It came from the lips of dying love. 'I am about,' He seems to say, 'to encounter the hour and power of darkness for you. Will you not accept My own self-surrender and sacrifice, My tears and groans and agony, as the pledge that I can enter, from personal experience, into your uttermost griefs? I can send no unnecessary trial. Trust My "hereafter promise." And, meanwhile, let the reverential saying be your own\emdash the saying I am about to utter in the garden-shade, in the name of all Isufferers\emdash "This cup which My heavenly Father gives Me to drink, shall I not drink it?"'\par \par Yes, "hereafter." "I will make" (not "I have made") "crooked things straight." "Hereafter"\emdash Reader, let that word ring its solitary chime in your darkness. We cannot too often recall, how emphatically the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews loves to echo the same\emdash "Nevertheless AFTERWARD" (Heb. 12:11). It is the Divine order and sequence. Present ignorance, future unfoldings. PresJent darkness, future illumination. Present blindness, the full vision of God; His "light of fire" transforming the arid wastes and sands of the wilderness into a pathway of safety and peace. Even in this world, when, as just noted, the atmosphere is dulled with haze and mist and cloud, we have flashing gleams from the Pillar\emdash revelations, partial and incomplete it may be, of the ways of the Almighty, strange minglings of light and shadow. In the unblighted home above, there will be a finished retrosKpect of wisdom and faithfulness, the light of fire without the murky cloud\emdash the pathetic appeal of the patriarch sufferer heard no more\emdash "When shall I arise and the night be gone?" (Job 7:4).\par \par Recognize, then, sorrowing one, God's hand and presence in this, and all the solemn passages of your life; the day-cloud given to temper the heat of prosperity, the fire-cloud to counteract the noxious exhalations of adversity. "When I am weary and disappointed," says a sympathetic writLer, "when the skies lower into the somber night, when there is no song of bird, and the perfume of flowers is but their dying breath; when all is unsetting and autumn; then I yearn for Him who sits with the summer of love in His soul, and feel that earthly affection is but a glow-worm light, compared to that which blazes with such effulgence in the heart of God." Other lights maybe obscured or missing; yours may possibly even now be either the mourner's watch, with its hushed vigils, or you may be sundereMd by death from dearly loved ones, yearning for "the touch of the vanished hand." You cannot be away from the touch of God. "The Lord your God is with you wherever you go." Grow not weary of His correction. He loves you through your anguish, and will yet assuredly vindicate the rectitude of all His procedure.\par \par The lines seem so appropriate, in closing this meditation, that their familiarity will not deter transcribing them. They form the prayer and solace of all "Pilgrims of the night," Nas they look upwards to their Guiding Pillar\emdash\par "Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,\par Lead me on!\par The night is dark, and I am far from home,\par Lead me on!\par O keep my feet: I do not ask to see\par The distant scene\emdash one step enough for me.\par \par "So long Your power has blest me, sure it still\par Will lead me on\par Over moor and marsh, over crag and torrent, until\par The night is gone.\par And with the morn those angel faces smile\par Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile."\par \par Ceasing unavailing tears, look forward to the time when the promise of earth will be perpetuated without symbol in the heavenly city: and when a new meaning will be given to the old words of the Wilderness Leader\emdash "But all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings."\par \cf1\fs23\par } wwCY=16 The Border River{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 THE BORDER RIVER\par \par "The Lord went before them by night in a pP9]%15 Light in Darkness{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f@Qillar of fire."\par \par "Behold, the ark of the Covenant of the Lord of all the earth passes over before you into Jordan"\emdash Josh. 3:11.\par \par "And the king said unto him, Come over with me, and I will feed you with me in Jerusalem."\emdash 2 Sam. 19:33.\par \par The theme of this meditation may seem a step backward from the preceding; but I have purposely retained it as an appropriate one with which to close our volume. The wilderness Pillar was undeviating in its guRidance to the end. This pillar of the Hebrew host never failed in "giving light by night to these" until Jordan was reached.\par \par We can picture it as it moved silently, majestically through the hills of Moab\emdash from upland to upland, from ridge to ridge, from valley to valley\emdash the pioneer of the mighty multitude, until its fiery splendor was seen for the last time. It had for forty long years shot up its column to the heavens. Now that its mission is accomplished, it ceases to shiSne. Its sacramental purpose is no more needed.\par \par Yet, in another sense, it was more needed than ever. If the visible symbol be removed, is there no guarantee for further Divine guidance at this final crisis-hour? When the river\emdash the arrowy river rushing through its gorges\emdash (for Jordan was in full flood) was seen by the pilgrim tribes, the question must have naturally passed from lip to lip\emdash 'How are we to cross the impetuous barrier?' Joshua calms their fears with the inTspiring assurance, "Behold, the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth passes over before you into Jordan."\par \par Believer, with you also, in a true anti-typical sense, the border-river may now, or before long, be within sight. For yourself\emdash (more possibly for some one near and dear to you) there is a gradual or near approach to the end of the pilgrimage. It is a new experience. In the words of Joshua uttered at the same historic hour, "You have not passed this way before" (JoUsh. 3:4). It is the night of nights\emdash night in its deepest darkness. You may try to invent euphemisms to dim and mitigate the gloom. It is nevertheless too surely, too dreadfully, the advent of the King of terrors. But if by grace served heir to the hopes and promises of the Gospel, that final passage is not traversed alone. Your Savior-God (Joshua-Jesus) gives a corresponding assurance\emdash a better counterpart to that of Israel's commander\emdash "Lo, I am with you aways, even unto the end of theV world" (Matt. 28:20). "I am the first and the last" (Rev. 1:17). He will be true to His own covenant word, "Fear not, for I am with you" (Isaiah 43:2).\par \par No, more, not only does He conduct you through the stream, but He has Himself forded it. He knows what death and the grave are. He surrendered Himself to both, a voluntary captive. As He, the Incarnate Redeemer, the Divine Son of Man, has shared every wilderness experience of His people, so also this closing one. "Fear not: I am He thatW lives and was dead" (Rev. 1:18). 'Can you dread,' He seems to say, 'to pass what I have encountered before you? With Me at your side you will go over dry shod. I have sanctified that hour of departure by My own. By My dying, the tomb has been transfigured. The gate of the grave has been made the gate of Heaven. I have "abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light!"'\par \par Believer! when the wilderness journey is about to end\emdash the better Canaan in sight, take God to witnesXs, as did the Hebrew leader, "There has not failed one word of all His good promise which He promised" (1 Kings 8:56). "The light of fire" has been "all the night"; it has never dimmed. The faithfulness of Jehovah in the past is a pledge that He will not forsake you now. He who guaranteed special provision for the roughest part of the way (Deut. 33:25) will not forget you in the supreme hour of all. And when the guiding column fails, it is only to be superseded by "the glory that excels." You will not neeYd the Shadow where you have the Substance. You will not need the Satellites where you have the Sun. You will not need the Symbol where you have the all-glorious Reality. In the words of a recent theme of meditation\emdash "God Himself shall be with them, and be their God." The invitation will then be true regarding every ransomed Israelite, in a far higher and nobler sense than when uttered to the aged Gilead chief by the brink of the literal Jordan\emdash "And the king said unto him, Come over with me, aZnd I will feed you WITH ME in Jerusalem."\par \par Wondrous must have been the spectacle in that final hour of the Hebrew march\emdash the goal of the desert wanderings. Already some had pitched their tents amid the acacias and palm-groves which studded the plain beyond, near to the Valley of Achor and the walls of Jericho. But the safety of all was secured: alike manhood in its strength; infancy in its feebleness; age in its decrepitude. The crossing was completed, doubtless with a hymn of vict[ory, similar to that which resounded on the Red Sea shores. Thus will it be with the army of the Redeemed\emdash "the multitude which no man can number"! The Great Captain of Salvation will not only be their faithful Protector and Guide, but He will secure that however varied their bygone experience, there will be a glorious meeting at last, as individuals and families, in "scenes beyond the flood,"\emdash "the fields of living green." And so all Israel shall be saved (Rom. 11:26).\par \par You \who are laid on beds of hopeless suffering, wait patiently amid the experiences of "death's dark night," until the sentinel footsteps are heard with tidings of the dawn. Pain, weakness, and languor, inseparable from the closing hour, may be yours, or that of those by whose couch you are keeping sacred watch. But though an enemy confronts you, it is the last enemy. It is but the boom of the breakers telling that the voyage is ending and the heavenly shore is at hand. John in Patmos, as he listened to the b]last of trumpets and beheld the outpouring of vials\emdash in the hush and interlude of the great drama, heard a voice saying, "Write; Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord." Be it yours to subscribe the inspired beatitude. Feeling that "to die is gain," let this be your prayer and calm resolve\emdash "All the days of my appointed time, (or as rendered in the Revised Version, "of my warfare,") would I wait until my release come."\par \par "Now we pitched our final tent,\par The des^ert journey done:\par The glorious hills of the Better Land\par Gleamed in the setting sun.\par \par "The great and terrible river\par Which we stood by night to view\par Is left far off in the darkness,\par For the Lord has brought us through."\par \par Meanwhile, with memories of the goodness and mercy that have followed you all the days of your life\emdash a wilderness-vista of these, you can take up the great song of the ages, "the Song _of the Valley," the most familiar of all inspired words, with their rhythmic music\emdash "I will fear no evil, for You are with me. Your rod and Your staff comfort me." It is, at best, but a brief transit. It is only the shadow of death. The substance\emdash the terribleness has been taken away by Him who announced in a note of prophetic triumph, "I will ransom them from the power of the grave, I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be your plague, O grave, I will be your destruction." "With that` staff," said an aged pilgrim, speaking of the revealed Christ of the Bible with His supporting grace\emdash "will I pass over this Jordan."\par \par "My work is done; I lay me down to die.\par Weary and travel-worn I long for rest.\par Speak but the word, dear Master, and I fly,\par A dove let loose, to nestle in Your breast.\par \par "It is enough, dear Master\emdash yes, Amen!\par I will not breathe one murmur of reply.\par Only fulfill Yaour work in me, and then\par Call me, and bid me answer, 'Here am I.'"\par \par O God, when the terminating hour of the pilgrimage comes to me, or comes to those I love, shine upon us through the flaming Pillar! I seek no other funeral torch but this. Let it prove what a lighthouse often is in "crossing the bar" of some earthly harbor, when friends are disclosed on the pier waving their welcome. Yes, the thought of reunion after long years of separation, will joyfully mingle with other bsupreme visions of the Home hereafter, and God will be found true to His word, "the God not of the dead but of the living."\par \par "We must not doubt, or fear, or dread,\par That love for life is only given,\par And that the calm and sainted dead\par Will meet unrecognized in Heaven;\par But that which makes this life so sweet\par Shall make eternal joy complete."\par \par Was it a cheering thought to the Hebrews, that once on the Canaan scide, their feet touched the land made sacred by the names of the patriarchs\emdash the pilgrim fathers of their nation sleeping in the not distant cave of Machpelah? What, O child of promise, will be your joy, when, the border-river left behind, you come not only to share the Presence of the King in Jerusalem, but also to recognize sainted ones gone before you; and, as a member of the family of the glorified, sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of Your Father?\par \par May the fleeting meditations of the foregoing pages carry with them a few balm-words of comfort to those who may stand much in need of such. Pausing once more under the Column of Fire\emdash or rather, with the last gleam of the Pillar reflected in the gloomy waters, and with our faces and footsteps turned to the City of the living God, let us sing the final, triumphant note\emdash "Death is swallowed up in VICTORY."\par \par "And they all passed over Jordan by morning light."\par \cf1\fs23\par } eight in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people." Exodus 13:21-22\par \par Preface\par The Comforter and His Comforts\par Divine Sovereignty\par Memories\par Sickness Soothed\par Consolation and Strength\par Mysterious Dealings\par Precious Death\par Parental Tenderness\par Abounding Grace\par The Great Sympathizer\par Pilgrims and Strangers\par Ligfht on the Morrow\par The Power of Prayer\par The Chastisement of Love\par Light in Darkness\par The Border River\par \par \par \par THE PILLAR IN THE NIGHT\par \par by John MacDuff\par \par Preface\par \par "By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its pglace in front of the people." Exodus 13:21-22\par \par This book is addressed to those in AFFLICTION. There is a touching tradition, to which he has elsewhere referred, regarding the Jewish Temple of old, that it had a gateway reserved exclusively for mourners. Such is the present volume. It opens up a pathway to God's sanctuary trodden by the footsteps of sorrow. It is sacred to dimmed eyes, and broken hearts, and tender memories. Moreover, though not exclusively, it is the wide family of the bhereaved the writer has chiefly in view.\par \par A few words on the TITLE. Nothing is more impressive in the desert journeys of the Israelites, than the miraculous moving Pillar which preceded them. That Pillar, as they advanced by day, took the form of a column: when they halted, it spread itself over the tabernacle as a canopy of cloud. It was nothing else than the Shekinah\emdash the visible symbol of the Divine Presence. It resolved itself into a flaming fire by night; an equally glorious emiblem, under the star-lit vault of heaven, of Jehovah's guidance. "Gathering up its luminous folds," it led the sacramental host in silence along plateau and valley. Rising high, it was seen far and wide by the vast caravan: the gleam\emdash the lurid coruscation\emdash now lighting up the mysterious cliffs of the Mount of God, now projected through wastes of sand to the rim of the horizon, creating, athwart leagues of desert, an illuminated golden pathway. It had even a gracious natural use. As the day-cljoud tempered the tremulous palpitating heat, screening from the glare of sunlight\emdash "the sun shall not smite you by day,"\emdash so the holy fire, kindled at the setting in of darkness, helped to disperse the damps and chill dews of night. Regarding both aspects of the one Pillar, it could be said, in the words of the Book of Proverbs, "When you go it shall lead you: when you sleep it shall keep you: and when you awake it shall talk with you," (Prov. 6:22).\par \par The flaming column, morekover, it may not be out of place to note, continued its significant lessons in the Gospel age. In the anniversary Jewish festival, the Feast of Tabernacles, when at each returning autumn in Palestine the wilderness journeyings were commemorated, the impressive symbol was not forgotten. During the day, the leafy encampments (Succoth) on the Mount of Olives and in the environs of Jerusalem, rehearsed the old nomad life with its "dwelling in tents." After the hour of sunset, the torches carried by the crowd;l above all, the gigantic candelabra, lighted high on the Temple platform, and which illuminated hill and valley, terraced vineyard and olive grove, as well as court and cloister, recalled the glow of "the Pillar in the night"\emdash while, at the same great gathering, Christ, with purposed allusion, revealed Himself as the true Pillar of Fire\emdash "I am the Light of the world" (John 8:12).\par \par With Israel, the mystic type left its varied memories, by the Red Sea, Migdol, Elim, Marah, Rephmidim, Horeb; until, Jordan reached, its light was needed no more. So is it associated still, in a deeper spiritual sense, with all the diverse experiences of "the pilgrims of the night." Could there possibly be a more significant emblem of God's constant presence, His protecting care and love, His sympathy specially in the deep gloom of bereavement? When human helps are gone, when moon and stars, human luminaries and satellites have paled in the skies, and the way is pursued in loneliness and darkness, Hen lights a beacon in "the sea of the desert." A Pillar, gleaming with ruby splendor appears, respecting which this is the Divine legend on the lips of many a child of sorrow\emdash "He LED them all the night with a LIGHT of fire."\par \par Yes, the Jehovah of the Pillar which moved along the Sinai route, keeps nightly vigil over His people still; and it is not in one trial, but in all trials\emdash "Your faithfulness (marginal rendering) in the nights" (Psalm 92:2). "He who keeps Israel shall neiother slumber nor sleep." He makes the night of pain and separation and death, luminous. "The great and terrible wilderness" becomes a Peniel; so that the experience of His people is often that of a kindred patriarch-sufferer, "By His light I walked through darkness" (Job 29:3), or, of another, "If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about me" (Psalm 139:11).\par \par Of how many among the white-robed multitude above, who have "come out of great tribulation,"\pemdash those who are done with the desert and crossed the typical Jordan\emdash may it be said, in the remembrance of the fiery Pillar, "It gave light by night to these!" (Exod. 14:20). Happy, O Israel, of all ages, amid the dreadful sanctities of sorrow, to be bathed in that "excellent glory"; to love God's own beacon, gleaming with love and promise, illuminating your darkened way, until you reach the land where, in His full vision and fruition, symbol is unneeded\emdash for "there shall be no night therqe"; "The Lord shall be your everlasting light, and the days of your mourning shall be ended" (Isaiah 60:20). Pause, meanwhile, under the radiance of the Pillar, and make it your prayer\emdash "If Your presence goes not with me, carry us not up hence." Hear the gracious response, "My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest" (Exod. 33:14, 15).\par \par Affliction has ever been the gracious season for revival, quickening, restoration. Remember, in the case of the Hebrew host, it was when the night and its shadows were gathering, that the invocation\emdash the sweet Angelus of the desert\emdash was heard (may it have its responsive meaning in the case of many): "Return, O Lord, unto the many thousands of Israel!" And when the last night of the journey arrives, may it be ours, under the gleam of the Pillar, to sing in the retrospect the refrain of the great Psalm of the Exodus: "To Him who led His people through the wilderness; for His mercy endures forever!"\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } 2]MacDuff - Pillar in the Night, The{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs22 THE PILLAR IN THE NIGHT\par by John MacDuff\par \par "By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by nd