There is no royal road to character; no charmed career was Christ's. He went through travail unspeakable because he evaded nothing. In the battle and the march He went straight on to make Himself like God. The leadership of Him was and is the leadership of character. The standard has not changed. Leadership goes not to the liar, but to him who speaks the truth; not to him of lust, but to him of chastity; not to him of craft, but to him of honor; not to the coward, but to the courageous; not to the man of the earth, earthy, but to the man who lifts his head to receive the light from the countenance of God. For God is in His heaven. Sings Bishop Spalding:

The essential truth of life remains,
Its goodness and its beauty too;
Pure love's unutterable gains,

And love which thrills us through and through:
God has not fled,

Souls are not dead.

In one of the letters of Paul, he tells us how, at Antioch, meeting Peter, whom he had eclipsed as an apostle because he was a greater scholar and a mightier spirit and a straighter man, he tells us how he charged the vacillating, though brilliant and emotional disciple, with being first on one side and then on the other. He would waver as the prevailing prestige shifted from Christianity to Judaism. Paul called him to account. He "withstood him to his face". For the man of sand who was to become the rock of the Church, this word did as much to effect his metamorphosis as anything in his career.

A sequel to this incident, perhaps, is recorded in one of the letters attributed to Peter. It seemed to be written out of the sweat of his anguished soul. "For what glory is it," he asks, “if, when ye be buf

feted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? But if when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God." It required the former unworthy kind of suffering, for his faults,did it not, to wake up the turbulent but great soul of Peter and make him see the better kind of travail?

We like

The way of Peter is the way of us all. We read best as symbol the story of the Gospel about a woman in travail. She then hath sorrow. But when her hour is come and she is delivered, her sorrow is turned into joy, for a man is born into the world. wise enter into travail, daily, and know the sorrow thereof. But when we are delivered, are born again into a new man, what joy that passeth understanding! We know the saying is true, "He shall see the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied."

M

IV.

Trouble: Does God Send It?

ISERABLE comforters are ye all!" exclaimed Job in anger at the professional words of his friends. "How long will ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words?" So might you well say if I should offer you admonitions and explanations that mock while they fail to heal. The wisest word a man can say, it seems, in the inexplicable presence of trouble, is that we are all, every one of us, helpless either to stay it or to say why it comes to us.

Out of our common helplessness comes our help to one another in the sympathy we share in the presence of this perplexing, mysterious fact.

If you turn to the New Testament writings, you find no answer there to our question. The book is full of troubles, but the philosophy of trouble, or the psychology of it, perhaps there is wisdom in the omission quite as inspired as are many of the explicit teachings of Holy Writ.

We are troubled,
But that means
The attempt to
death of a dear

Of this, however, at the very outset, we ought to be certain: In spite of the preaching contrariwise, our troubles are not sent upon us as "visitations of Providence" in punishment of us. to be sure, as the fruit of our sins. the relation of cause and effect. relate unrelated things, such as the child, let us say, with the failure of the father to attend church, is a bit of unpardonable ignorance, a mark of wicked superstition, of blasphemy against the Holy of Holies. (Of course he ought to go to church.)

God sends His rains upon the just and the unjust; and so come troubles, in great part, regardless of the lives we lead. The saint knows his anguish no less than the sinner. In fact, for his sanctity he may know more trouble, and know it more deeply.

Some of the causes of trouble we can explain. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' Break the law and the law will break you. Be care

less, and your position declines and your character. Be extravagant, and your latter days will haunt you in your bitter need. Be hateful, and the world will not love you, but you will go your lonely, friendless way. Be given to lust, and the wasting of your body, the dissolution of your mind, come on apace. the law is adamant. The wages are sure.

For

It is clear that we also have trouble for our innocence. We are members one of another. If my brother offend, I suffer for it. A deceit, a carnal sin, an insanitary act by my neighbor, or by me, trails its unending blight hither and yon. Though innocent, I reap, and so do you, what the guilty have sown. Surely God has no part in bringing this upon

us.

It may be more troublesome to be even better than an innocent man. The struggler against evil, what has he for his zeal? Generally there are among the respectable and I so speak of them in irony those who knife him with poisoned words behind private doors. The man who hurls his soul against the inertia of his business, his Church, his city, if he succeed, great is his reward. But if he suffer, and God knows he will suffer,—it will likely be in the measure of his love of his kind, and the measure of his passion that they march on! Opposition, noble-hearted, strong-armed, against the cheap and mean, meets with opposition that prefers the mean and cheap. The issue is joined. The fight is on. The clash is glorious, but it entails a burden of trouble.

This all seems normal enough, if we get at the heart of life. Affliction cometh not forth out of the dust; neither doth trouble spring out of the ground. yet man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly up

ward. Trouble enters into the very stuff that makes us better than the dust and the ground. It came with the breath of life breathed into our nostrilswhen man was made a living soul! Without trouble, who could ascend unto the hill of the Lord? Who could join the nobility of our God?

What happens when trouble comes? How do people behave? The first consequence is a cry of despair: How could God do this? And then, Is there a God? I cannot find Him. It repeats the experience of Job:

Behold I go forward,

But he is not there;

And backward,

But I cannot perceive him;

On the left hand, when he doth work,
But I cannot behold him;

He hideth himself on the right hand,
That I cannot see him.

How much of this despond, this feeling that we are. lost from God, is to be laid at the door of poor dogmas about God no man can tell. The glib explanations that do not explain may be quite as much responsible as the trouble itself. It is wicked to speak of "God's will" when some calamity has overwhelmed us; when a loved one has been smitten by death. God is of the living and not of the dead. Yet say as much for wisdom as we will, the pall will cover us, the dark hours envelope us. Hope goes from the soul.

Out of this condition a better comes,- or it may be a worse. Open, outspoken rebellion it may be. Can you wonder that men have gone so far as even to hate God, of whom they have been taught to believe that for His "good pleasure" he took away the beautiful child, or brought ruin upon one's estate, or wreaked the vengeance of His being by forcing the failure of one's business? These mon