every man has his burden. If God designed our lives to end at
the grave, may we not believe that He would have freed an existence so
brief from the cares and sorrows to which, since the beginning of the
world, mankind has been subjected? Suppose that I am a kind father, and
have a child whom I dearly love, but I know by a divine revelation
that he will die at the age of eight years, surely I should not vex his
infancy by needless preparations for the duties of life? If I am a rich
man, I should not send him from the caresses of his mother to the stern
discipline of school. If I am a poor man, I should not take him with me
to hedge and dig, to scorch in the sun, to freeze in the winter's cold:
why inflict hardships on his childhood for the purpose of fitting him
for manhood, when I know that he is doomed not to grow into man? But
if, on the other hand, I believe my child is reserved for a more durable
existence, then should I not, out of the very love I bear to him,
prepare his childhood for the struggle of life, according to that
station in which he is born, giving many a toil, many a pain, to the
infant, in order to rear and strengthen him for his duties as man? So it
is with our Father that is in heaven. Viewing this life as our infancy
and the next as our spiritual maturity, where 'in the ages to come He
may show the exceeding riches of His grace,' it is in His tenderness,
as in His wisdom; to permit the toil and the pain which, in tasking
the powers and developing the virtue of the soul, prepare it for 'the
earnest of our inheritance.' Hence it is that every man has his burden.
Brethren, if you believe that God is good, yea, but as tender as a human
father, you will know that your troubles in life are a proof that you
are reared for an eternity. But each man thinks his own burden the
hardest to bear: the poor-man groans under his poverty, the rich man
under the cares that multiply with wealth. For so far from wealth
freeing us from trouble, all the wise men who have written in all ages
have repeated, with one voice, the words of the wisest, 'When goods
increase, they are increased that eat them: and what good is there to
the owners thereof, saving the beholding of them with their eyes?' And
this is literally true, my brethren: for, let a man be as rich as was
the great King Solomon himself, unless he lock up all his gold in a
chest, it must go abroad to be divided amongst others; yea, though,
like Solomon, he make him