himself with his last breath and gave the military salute with the words: "All is well where your majesty leads!" Then he fell back a corpse. How many soldiers of Christ have in like manner said in dying: "All is well where Jesus leads!" To them death is not a going from, but a going to, the Lord. He himself, who has gone on ahead of his people to prepare for them a place, comes at death to take them to be with him forever. If he comes to take, and if he is with us in the departure, we may be sure that he will be there to receive. The Shepherd who led us here through our desert journey will lead us there by the river of the water of life. We shall find throughout eternity that he ever goes before. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them who love him." Away then with all care or doubt or fear. either in our own deaths or in the deaths of those we love. "When I awake," in the resurrection morning, "I am still with thee," for on earth or in heaven, in time or eternity, the word will still hold true that "the God of my mercy shall prevent me," shall go before me for my present and everlasting good. Thus the text presents to us a new phase of God's omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence. Everywhere and always God is present, God anticipates, God provides. "Thou hast beset me behind and before," says the psalmist, "and hast laid thy hand upon me." If that hand were laid upon us for evil, how heavy the hand would be! But it is only for good. All these attributes of God are engaged on the side of the Christian. It is these very attributes that compel all things to work together for good to those who love God. How great the possessions of the Christian who can say: "O God, thou art my God!" He feeds in pastures large and fair Of love and truth divine; O child of God, O glory's heir, How rich a lot is thine! Could there be a greater motive to submission and trust? If the omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent God makes all things in the universe work together for my good, should I not esteem it my greatest honor and joy to be a worker together with him? If God is willing to lead me, ought I not to be willing to follow? May God help us here and now to give ourselves unreservedly to him, since our only hope, our only joy, our only salvation, is to say from the heart: "The God of my mercy shall prevent me." XLII THE SUFFERING AND THE BLESSED GOD' THE Christian life is a life of mingled joy and sorrow, and the Christian minister must know, not only the joy of the Lord, but also the fellowship of his sufferings. It is well for the pastor, and it is well for his people, to know at the start that this is to be expected, because this is the natural and necessary result of sharing in the life of God. God's life is a life of mingled joy and sorrow. I wish to set this truth before you; and I take two texts. The first you will find in Isa. 63:9:"In all their affliction he was afflicted," and the second in 1 Tim. 1: 11: "The glorious gospel of the blessed God." The suffering, and yet the blessed, God! It is a strange contrast, and even a seeming contradiction. God is said in one passage to be afflicted, and in another to be blessed. The two texts are only representatives of many others which might be cited. On the one hand we read that God repented that he had made man and it grieved him at his heart. On the other hand he is said to be God over all, blessed forever. It is no wonder that theologians, in their consideration of these passages, have been perplexed and divided. Some have thought that the very perfection 1 A sermon preached at the ordination of William Gaylord James, as pastor of the Baptist Church, Fort Plain, N. Y., June 27, 1902. of God required them to maintain that God cannot suffer. Others have held that a God who cannot suffer must be destitute of feeling, and so cannot be God at all. The Scripture seems to teach that God can and does suffer, and yet that in, and on account of, that very suffering, God is blessed. Let us try to get the elements of the problem before us, and then to learn the lessons of doctrine and practice which it teaches us. First, then, God must suffer, or else he must be without holiness and without love. But God is holy, and his holiness involves a profound desire that his creatures should be holy as he is holy. The urgency of his law, and the inevitableness of the misery that follows the violation of that law, show that this desire is fundamental to God's being. He cannot look upon sin with allowance; nay, he is angry with the wicked every day. And that hatred to sin involves suffering. Henry Drummond, in his evangelistic meetings, drew all hearts to him. Great transgressors told him the dreadful secrets of their lives. He was appalled at their confessions, and one day he said: "I am sick of the sins of these men,-how can God bear it?" Ah, yes, how can the Holy One bear it? If Henry Drummond suffered when he learned the sins of a few, can God fail to suffer, when he has spread before him continually the sins of all? But God is not only holiness, he is also love. And love does not make others a mere appendage to itself. It rather merges itself in their interest and happiness. It rejoices in their joy; it weeps with their sorrow. Love is impossible without sympathy; and sympathy, as the etymology of the word indicates, is a suffering with others. Love is impossible without sacrificethe giving up of our pleasure for others' good, and sacrifice means some measure at least of suffering. We do not regard an unsympathetic man as worthy of admiration. It is the man of tender heart, of broad affections, of self-sacrificing nature, that best answers to our idea of humanity. And shall we think that God is less compassionate than man, that he in whose image we are made feels less than we the sorrows and griefs of his creatures? I know that it is hard for us to realize that God's greatness is consistent with suffering. Can one so powerful and so wise feel deeply for creatures so weak and insignificant as we? Well, what is our verdict with regard to human beings? Can a man who is truly great be moved by the sufferings of a little child? Do we not see that his ability to feel is the very measure of his greatness, and that inability to feel is his shame and degradation? And yet there have been teachers of doctrine to declare that the greatness of God requires him to be impassive, unaffected by our earthly trials or our earthly sins, and they have spoken of him as if he were an Egyptian sphinx with face of stony calm, or an arctic iceberg with glittering sides but frozen heart. Tennyson describes the Lotus Eaters as longing for the immovable quiet of the gods: Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, |