Let us strive, brethren, to attain to this knowledge, to this pure vision of the Most High. Let us purge our minds of all that seems to darken its clear light, by whatever name the darkness may be called. "God is light," and in Him is no darkness at all. "God is love, and he that loveth not knoweth not God." This is our gospel. If we get this into our mind and heart, all else that we need to know will follow in its right order. Without this first all else will be confusion and perplexity. And into this light of His own truth may He lead us, who came to seek and to save us who were lost, and who said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."

And to whom be all glory in the Church for ever and ever. Amen.

174

XII.

THE TRUE DELIVERANCE.

Call upon me in the day of trouble, I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.-PSALM 1. 15.

HE relation of our human need to the divine

THE

help that is in God is one that often seems hard to understand. Here, for instance, is a direct promise which many an one must have been tempted to think was a promise not to be trusted. Many an one, in the day of trouble, has called on God even with an exceeding bitter cry, and yet has found no deliverance. The "cloudy and dark day" has continued full of a gloom, which no light from heaven has broken through to relieve. The hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, has been deferred and still deferred, but never fulfilled. The blow which we dreaded, and which we prayed might not fall, has fallen. How often has the tempest raged and overwhelmed the ship, for which many a prayer was going up to heaven. How often

has the pestilence walked on in darkness, and not spared the life for which the earnest cry of parent, or brother, or wife, or friend, was poured out before God. There seems to be no ear to hear, no voice to answer, no hand to help. Everything in earth and heaven appears as if indifferent to our appeal, callous to our distress. The sun shines as brightly on our sorrow as on our joy. The wind blows as gaily past us when our hearts are heavy as when they are light. The grass grows as green over the grave as it does in the sheltered garden, or by the flowing stream. Outward nature is unconscious of our vicissitudes of adversity and grief; and He who is above nature, who lays down the laws which nature obeys, seems far away from us, and to forget His own word "Call upon Me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee." We call, and we look for the deliverance; but it does not come. This many an one knows to be an experience by no means rare; and all who have ever known it must have felt it to be an experience full of perplexity and trying to faith. "Is the Lord's ear heavy that He cannot hear? Is His arm shortened that He cannot save? Has He forgotten to be gracious? Doth His promise fail for evermore?" Questions such as these occur, and press for answer; and the answer seems sometimes hard to find. They are not questions that occur only to the careless, the short-sighted, the impatient, the unfaithful. They have troubled the

most earnest and most faithful souls. They troubled, for instance, the mind of the great Elijah, when in the day of danger and downfall (as he believed it to be) he fled "for his life" to the wilderness, and made his complaint to God that His servant's work had failed; that the good cause was overthown; that farther effort for it was of no avail. They must have cast their shadow over the mind of a greater than Elijah, when, in His last extremity, He seemed for a moment to lose His strong grasp of the Father's hand, and was constrained to cry, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" In each case there was disappointment, the bitter sense, it may be, of having trusted in vain, of having believed that to be sure which had proved uncertain, of having sought a stronghold which, after all, was not strong-but a passing cloud as it must have been, in the case of the Son of God, but yet as it passed, terrible enough to make a yet darker shadow during "the hour and power of darkness."

Now, is there any real ground for such disappointment, for the temptation to distrust in the future, for the feeling "I have trusted in vain, and have called upon God for nought. I shall do so no more. His word has failed me in my hour of need. I shall not rely on it again." Is there, can there be, any real ground for that?

It would be very awful if we believed there was,

if we had to think of God, as we have too often to think of men, as not to be depended on, not to be trusted to make good His word. Most people would say, I think, that it would be better to know no God, and to believe in no God, than to have a God such as this, and to try to believe in Him. If we believe in God at all, we must believe that He is true, that to Him all falsity, all carelessness, all forgetfulness of His word is impossible; and that if He has given us a promise which we think He does not keep, has led us to hope for something which He does not give, we must have been misunderstanding His promise, and hoping for something which He never intended. to give us, and which we should not have looked for, if we had understood Him aright. If we call upon God in the day of our trouble, He having told us to do so, and promised us "deliverance" if we do so, and if we do not, for all our calling, get the deliverance which we desire, then we may be certain that that which we desire is not what God means when He speaks of deliverance. We may be certain that we are asking for one thing, when He is thinking of another.

We are perhaps, too, misunderstanding what God means when He says, "Call upon me." Do we not

interpret that too much just as if it

meant that,

when we saw no other way out of our distress, we

M