ever possible; at any moment the key-note may be
struck.

The firmest, best-prepared natures are often beside themselves with
astonishment and dismay, when they are called to this dread initiation.
They thought it a very happy world before,--a glorious universe. Now it
is darkened with the shadow of insoluble mysteries. Why this everlasting
tramp of inevitable laws on quivering life? If the wheels must roll, why
must the crushed be so living and sensitive?

And yet sorrow is godlike, sorrow is grand and great, sorrow is wise and
farseeing. Our own instinctive valuations, the intense sympathy which we
give to the tragedy which God has inwoven into the laws of Nature, show
us that it is with no slavish dread, no cowardly shrinking, that we
should approach her divine mysteries. What are the natures that cannot
suffer? Who values them? From the fat oyster, over which the silver
tide rises and falls without one pulse upon its fleshy ear, to the hero
who stands with quivering nerve parting with wife and child and home for
country and God, all the way up is an ascending scale, marked by
increasing power to suffer; and when we look to the Head of all being,
up through principalities and powers and princedoms, with dazzling
orders and celestial blazonry, to behold by what emblem the Infinite
Sovereign chooses to reveal himself, we behold, in the midst of the
throne, "a lamb as it had been slain."

Sorrow is divine. Sorrow is reigning on the throne of the universe, and
the crown of all crowns has been one of thorns. There have been many
books that treat of the mystery of sorrow, but only one that bids us
glory in tribulation, and count it all joy when we fall into divers
afflictions, that so we may be associated with that great fellowship of
suffering of which the Incarnate God is the head, and through which He
is carrying a redemptive conflict to a glorious victory over evil. If we
suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him.

Even in the very making up of our physical nature, God puts suggestions
of such a result. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the
morning." There are victorious powers in our nature which are all the
while working for us in our deepest pain. It is said, that, after the
sufferings of the rack, there ensues a period in which the simple repose
from torture produces a beatific trance; it is the reaction of Nature,
asserting the benignant intentions of her Creator. So, after great
mental co