he wanted even a tomb to
bury his dead, he could only obtain it by purchase. This difficulty is
expressly admitted in the text, "In the land of promise he sojourned
as in a strange country;" he dwelt there in tents--in changeful,
moveable tabernacles--not permanent habitations; he had no home
there.

It is stated in all its startling force, in terms still more explicit,
in the 7th chapter of the Acts, 5th verse, "And He gave him none
inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on: yet He
promised that He would give it to him for a possession, and to his
seed after him, when as yet he had no child."

Now the surprising point is that Abraham, deceived, as you might
almost say, did not complain of it as a deception; he was even
grateful for the non-fulfilment of the promise: he does not seem to
have expected its fulfilment; he did not look for Canaan, but for "a
city which had foundations;" his faith appears to have consisted in
disbelieving the letter, almost as much as in believing the spirit of
the promise.

And herein lies a principle, which, rightly expounded, can help us to
interpret this life of ours. God's promises never are fulfilled in the
sense in which they seem to have been given. Life is a deception; its
anticipations, which are God's promises to the imagination, are never
realized; they who know life best, and have trusted God most to fill
it with blessings, are ever the first to say that life is a series of
disappointments. And in the spirit of this text we have to say that it
is a wise and merciful arrangement which ordains it thus.

The wise and holy do not expect to find it otherwise--would not wish
it otherwise; their wisdom consists in disbelieving its promises. To
develope this idea would be a glorious task; for to justify God's ways
to man, to expound the mysteriousness of our present being, to
interpret God,--is not this the very essence of the ministerial
office? All that I can hope however to-day, is not to exhaust the
subject, but to furnish hints for thought. Over-statements may be
made, illustrations may be inadequate, the new ground of an almost
untrodden subject may be torn up too rudely; but remember, we are here
to live and die; in a few years it will be all over; meanwhile, what
we have to do is to try to understand, and to help one another to
understand, what it all means--what this strange and contradictory
thing, which we call Life,