maiden
praying in her chamber for her lover upon the distant battlefield, the
soldier answering her prayer from afar off with "Keep quiet, I am in
God's hands"--those very utterances of humanity which seemed to us most
noble, most pure, most beautiful, most divine--been all in vain? Mere
impertinences, the babblings of fair dreams, poured forth into no where,
to no thing, and in vain? Has every suffering, searching soul which ever
gazed up into the darkness of the unknown, in hopes of catching even a
glimpse of a divine Eye, beholding all, and ordering all, and pitying
all, gazed up in vain? Oh! my friends, those who believe, or fancy they
believe, such things, and can preach such doctrines without pity and
sorrow, know not of what they rob a mankind already but too miserable by
its own folly and its own sin--a mankind which if it have not hope in God
and in Christ, is truly, as Homer said of old, more miserable than the
beasts of the field.

_Westminster Sermons_.

When the human heart asks, Have we not only a God in Heaven, but a Father
in Heaven? that question can only be answered by our Lord Jesus Christ.
Truly He said, "No one cometh unto the Father but by Me. The only
begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath revealed Him."
And therefore we can find boundless comfort in the words, "Such as the
Father is, such is the Son and such the Holy Ghost." For now we know
that there is A MAN in the midst of the throne who is the brightness of
God's glory and the express image of His person--a high priest who can be
touched by the feeling of our infirmities, seeing He was tempted in all
things like as we are. To Him we can cry with human passion and in human
words, because we know that His human heart will respond to our human
hearts, and that His human heart again will respond to His Divine Spirit,
and that His Divine Spirit is the same as the Divine Spirit of His
Father, for their wills and minds are One, and their will and their mind
is boundless love to sinful men.

Yes, we can look up in our extreme need by faith into the sacred face of
Christ, and by faith take refuge within His sacred heart, saying, If it
be good for me, He will give what I ask; and if He gives it not, it is
because that too is good for me, and for others beside me. In all the
chances and changes of this mortal life we can say to Him, as He said in
that supreme hour--"If it be possible let this cup pass from Me,
nevertheless no