an
answer of peace to a man's soul, or it may not. But in this matter we are
dealing with things in which we cannot afford to risk an equivocal or a
despairing answer. We must win in every encounter. It is not an hour's joy,
but a life's outlook that is at stake. No hour's fight was ever worth
fighting if it was fought for the sake of the hour. The moments are ever
challenging the eternal, the swift and busy hours fling their gauntlets at
the feet of the ageless things. The real battle of life is never between
yesterday and to-day; it is always between to-day and the Forever.

To isolate an experience is to misinterpret it. We may even completely
classify experiences, and yet completely misunderstand experience. To
understand life at all we must get beyond the incidental and the
alternating. Life is not a series of events charged with elements of
contrast, contradiction, or surprise. It is a deep, coherent, and
unfaltering process. And one feels that it was something more than the
chance of the moment that led the singer of old to weave the tears and the
rejoicings of men's lives into a figure of speech that stands for unity of
process, even the figure of the harvest.

_They that sow in tears shall reap in joy._ The sweep of golden grain is
not some arbitrary compensation for the life of the seed cast so lavishly
into the ground, and biding the test of darkness and cold. It is the very
seed itself fulfilled of all its being. Even so it is with the sorrows of
these hearts of ours and the joy unto which God bringeth us. He does not
fling us a few glad hours to atone for the hours wherein we have suffered
adversity. There is a deep sense in which the joys of life are its ripened
sorrows.

_They that sow in tears.... He that goeth forth and weepeth._ These are not
the few who have been haunted by apparent failure, or beset with outwardly
painful conditions of service. They are not those who have walked in the
shadow of a lost leader, or toiled in the grey loneliness of a lost comrade
or of a brother proved untrue. For apparent failure, outward difficulty and
loneliness, often as we may have to face them, are, after all, only the
accidents of Godward toil. And if the bearer of seed for God's great
harvest should go forth to find no experience of these things, still, if he
is to do any real work in the fields of the Lord, he must go forth weeping.
He must sow in tears. Let a man be utterly faithful and sincere, let him
open