it
has come the sufferer will not yield to it. This, evidently, is not
resignation, religious resignation, but only sullen acquiescence, or
reckless hardihood.

In a certain sense it is true that we do well to take things as they
come,-that we cannot help the eternal laws that control events. But we
must go behind this truth. Whence do events come, and for what purpose
do they come? What is life, and for what end are all its varied
dispensations? Religion points us up beyond the cloud of materialism,
and behind the mechanism of nature, to an Infinite Spirit, to a God, to
a Father. All things are moved by infinite Love. Life is not merely
a phenomenon, it is a Lesson. Its events do not come and go, in a
causeless, arbitrary manner; they are meant for our discipline and our
good. In whatever aspect they come, then, let their appropriate lesson
be heeded. This is the religious view of life, and is wide apart from
the philosophy that lets events happen as they will, as though we were
in the setting of a heady current, and were borne along among other
matters that now help us, now jar and wound us,-that happen without
order and without object; all, like ourselves, driven along and taking
things as they come. In the religious view, all things stream from God's
throne, and whatever sky hangs over them, the infinite One is present;
prosperity is the sunshine that he has sent, and Faith, as she weeps,
beholds a bow in the clouds.

The religious man takes things as they come, but how? In a reverent and
filial spirit, a spirit that obeys and trusts because God has ordained.
He refers, behind the event, to the will that declares it. And yet, this
will be no formal lifeless resignation. He will not be stripped of his
manhood, or become unnatural in his religion. His resignation will not
be the cold assent of reason, or the mere rote and repetition of the
lips. No, it will be born in struggling and in sorrow. Religion is not
a process that makes our nature callous to all fierce heats or drenching
storms. Neither is he the most religious man who is calmest in the keen
crisis of trouble. I say in the crisis of trouble-for to human
vision there always is a crisis. We cannot penetrate to the secret
determinations of God, and in the season of care and affliction there
is a time when the issue is uncertain,-when we cannot say it is sealed.
What shall we do then? Is human agency nothing? Grant that we are
driving down a stream,-can we us