d
serious man--I punish my child, or my dog, and God punishes me. May
he not punish me for the same reason that I punish them? I punish
them to correct them and make them better. Surely God punishes me,
to correct me, and make me better. I punish my child, because I
love him, and wish him good. God punishes me because he loves me
and desires that I may be a partaker of his holiness.

And as soon as that blessed thought had risen up in any man's mind,
by the inspiration of God's Holy Spirit, all the world would begin
to look bright and clear and full of hope. This earth, with all its
sorrows and sufferings, would look no longer to him as God's prison
house, where poor sinners sat tortured and wailing, fast bound in
misery and iron, till they should pay the uttermost farthing, which
they never could pay. No. It would look to him as God's school-
house, God's reformatory, in which he is training and chastening and
correcting the souls of men, that he may deliver them from the ruin
and misery which sin brings on them, both the original sin which is
born in them and the actual sin which they commit. Then God appears
to him a gracious and merciful father. He can see a blessed meaning
and a wholesome use in all human suffering; and he can break out, as
the Psalmist does in this glorious psalm, into praise and
thanksgiving, and call on mankind to give thanks to the Lord; for he
is gracious, and his mercy endureth for ever.

In every kind of human suffering, I say, he sees now a meaning and a
use.

First, he takes, it seems, his own countrymen, the Jews, coming back
from Babylon into their own country after the seventy years'
captivity. They had been punished for their sins. But for what
purpose? That they might know (as Ezekiel said), that God was the
Lord. And when they cried unto him in their trouble, he delivered
them out of their distress.

Then he goes on to those who have brought themselves into poverty
and shame, and sit fast bound in misery and iron. It is their own
fault. They have brought it on themselves by rebelling against the
word of the Lord, and lightly regarding the counsel of the Most
Highest. But God does not hate them. God is not going to leave
them to the net which they have spread for their own feet. When
they cry unto the Lord in their troubles, he delivers them out of
their distress. God himself, by strange and unexpected ways, will
deliver them from their darkness of ignorance