before to warn us by a
premonitory experience that 'the wages of sin is death.' As a rule,
God does not interpose to pick a man out of the mud into which he has
been plunged by his own faults and follies, until he has learned the
lessons which he can find in plenty down in the slough, if he will
only look for them! And the fact that some great calamity or some
great joy affects a wide circle of people, does not make its having a
special lesson and meaning for each of them at all doubtful. _There_
is one of the great depths of all-moving wisdom and providence, that
in the very self-same act it is in one aspect universal, and in
another special and individual. The ordinary notion of a special
providence goes perilously near the belief that God's will is less
concerned in some parts of a man's life than in others. It is very
much like desecrating and secularising a whole land by the very act
of focussing the sanctity in some single consecrated shrine. But the
true belief is that the whole sweep of a life is under the will of
God, and that when, for instance, war ravages a nation, though the
sufferers be involved in a common ruin occasioned by murderous
ambition and measureless pride, yet for each of the sufferers the
common disaster has a special message. Let us believe in a divine
will which regards each individual caught up in the skirts of the
horrible storm, even as it regards each individual on whom the equal
rays of His universal sunshine fall. Let us believe that every single
soul has a place in the heart, and is taken into account in the
purposes of Him who moves the tempest, and makes His sun to shine
upon the unthankful and on the good. Let us, in accordance with the
counsel of the Apostle here, first of all try to anchor and rest our
own souls fast and firm in God all the day long, that, grasping His
hand, we may look out upon all the confused dance of fleeting
circumstances and say, 'Thy will is done on earth'--if not yet 'as it
is done in heaven,' still done in the issues and events of all--and
done with my cheerful obedience and thankful acceptance of its
commands and allotments in my own life.

II. The second idea which comes out of these words is this--Such
union with God will lead to contented continuance in our place,
whatever it be.

Our text is as if Paul had said, 'You have been "called" in such and
such worldly circumstances. The fact proves that these circumstances
do not obstruct the highest and