truth into shape upon the anvil of your life,
while the pounding of the lightning trip-hammer is upon your own quivering
flesh. It is seeing that which is most precious to you, so dear as to be
your very life, seeing that in a furnace, seven times heated, while you,
standing helplessly by, hope and trust perhaps, and yet _wonder_, even
while trusting, wonder _if_--(shall I say it the way your heart talks it
out within?), or, at most, wonderingly watch with heart almost stopped,
and eyes big, to see _if_ the form of the Fourth will intervene in _your_
case, or whether something else is the Father's will.

Experience is the three young Hebrews stepping with quiet, full,
heel-to-toe tread into the hotly flaming furnace, not sure but it meant
torture and death, only sure that it was the only right thing to do. It is
the old Babylonian premier actually lowering nearer and nearer to those
green eyes, and yawning jaws, and ivories polished on many a bone, clear
of duty though not clear of anything else.

A man having a financial understanding with his church, or a contract with
his employer, or a comfortable business, may be an earnest Christian,
living a life of prayer and realizing God's power in his life, but he
cannot know the meaning of the word _trust_ as George Mueller knew it
when he might waken in the morning with not enough food in hand for the
breakfast, only an hour off, of the two thousand orphans under his care,
and in answer to his waiting prayer have them all satisfied at the usual
breakfast hour. George Mueller himself did not know the meaning of "trust"
before such experiences as he did afterwards. No one can. We _know_ only
what we _experience_.

Now Jesus became a perfect man by means of the experiences He went
through. He is an older _Brother_ to us, for He has gone through ahead
where we are now going, and where we are yet to go. He was perfectly human
in this, that He did not know our human experiences, save as He Himself
went through those experiences. With full reverence be it said of the
divine Jesus, it was necessarily so, because He was so truly human.

The whole diapason of human experience, with its joyous majors and its
sobbing minors, He knew. Except, of course, the experiences growing out of
sin. These He could not know. They belong to the abnormal side of life.
And there was nothing abnormal about Him. It was fitting that Jesus,
coming as a man to save brother men, should develop the full h