e is ever
weaving for us snares too intricate for us to unravel and too strong for us
to break. God alone understands how they are made and how they may be
broken. He does not take us round the net or over it, but He does not leave
us fast by the feet in the midst of it. He always brings a man out on the
heavenward side of the earthly difficulty. Look upward and you are bound to
go forward.

V.

THE SAFEGUARDED SOUL

The Lord shall keep thee from all evil;
He shall keep thy soul.

Ps. cxxi. 7.

One of the great offices of religion is to help men to begin at the
beginning. If you wish to straighten out a tangle of string, you know that
it is worth your while to look patiently for one of the ends. If you make
an aimless dash at it the result is confusion worse confounded, and
by-and-by the tangle is thrown down in despair, its worst knots made by the
hands that tried in a haphazard way to simplify it. Life is that tangle;
and religion, if it does not loosen all the knots and straighten all the
twists, at least shows us where the two ends are. They are with God and the
soul. God deals with a man's soul. We cannot explain the facts of our
experience or the fashion of our circumstance save in as far as we can see
these things reflected in our character. The true spiritual philosophy of
life begins its inquiry in the soul, and works outward into all the
puzzling mass of life's details. And the foundation of such a philosophy is
not experience, but faith. It is true that experience often confirms faith,
but faith interprets experience. Experience asks more questions than it can
answer. It collects more facts than it can explain. It admits of many
different constructions being put upon it. It puts us first of all into
touch with the problem of life rather than the solution. If the gentle,
patient words of the saint are the utterance of one who has suffered, so
also are the bitter protests of the disappointed worldling. The fashion of
the experience may be the same in each case. It is faith that makes the
lesson different. It is a want of faith that makes us expect the lower in
life to explain the higher, the outward to shed light upon the inward. We
pluck with foolish, aimless fingers at this strange tangle of human life.
We judge God's way with us as far as we can see it, and we think we have
got to the end of it. We draw our shallow conclusions. Faith teaches us
that God's way with us is a longer and a dee