e evils of life than escape
from the air that we breathe. The pressure, it is true, is not always upon
us; we are not, without ceasing, weighed down by our labors and groaning
to be delivered from the body of this death. There is interruption, there
is passing pleasure, a rift in the clouds and a smile of the sunshine even
for the darkest and poorest life. And yet withal, we know and we are
conscious that we are ever under the sentence of death, that life is a
fleeting shadow, that like

"A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
Man passes from life to his rest in the grave."

There is no evading the conclusion, therefore, that the days of man in
this world are few and full of miseries. "The life of man upon earth is a
warfare, and his days are like the days of a hireling. He cometh forth
like a flower, and is destroyed, and fleeth as a shadow."(53) "For all
flesh is as grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of grass. The
grass is withered, and the flower thereof is fallen away."(54) To the
natural man all this is appalling, and how frequently it finds its
solution in unbridled self-indulgence, in mental unbalance, and
self-destruction! But the saints, and all the truly wise, have viewed the
problem of human suffering in a vastly different light. They have
discerned it, first of all, as really distinctive of the road to Heaven,
and as essentially pertaining to the royal way of the cross. They have
understood that it extinguishes the wrath of the heavenly Father, that it
atones for sin and makes the soul conformable to our suffering Saviour,
and therefore have they loved it. And more than this, those who have been
led by the wisdom of God have found, not only that the crosses of life are
essentially connected with the way of salvation, but that by them and
through them alone we are often _positively driven_ to God. We may try to
avoid them, and at times, perhaps, succeed; we may flee from them or
endeavor to still the voice of their pain; or, when unable to escape them,
we may, in our wrath and desperation, rise up against them and rebuke
them: but they persistently remain, they continue to haunt, as if to woo
and to win us to penetrate their deeper meaning, and discover the treasure
that in them lies concealed. The very breakdown of human things, the
severing of human ties and relationships, the loss of health and wealth,
of treasures and friends, and of all that life holds dear, are really
me