th everything that is good for us?

And as for our difficulties. Has it not been fulfilled in them--As thy
day so shall thy strength be? Have they not been God's sending? God's
way of preventing the cup of bliss being over sweet? and consider, have
they not been blessed lessons? Have we not had in all things with the
temptation a way to escape? So out of evil God brings good; or rather
out of necessity He brings strength. The highest spiritual training is
contained in the most paltry physical accidents; and the meanest actual
want may be the means of calling into actual life the possible but
sleeping embryo of the very noblest faculties.

This is a great mystery; but we are animals, in time and space; and by
time and space, and our animal natures, are we educated. Therefore let
us be only patient, patient; and let God our Father teach His own lesson,
His own way. Let us try to learn it well, and learn it quickly; but do
not let us fancy that He will ring the school bell, and send us to play
before our lesson is learnt.

_Letters and Memories_.

In all the events of life pray, pray take what God does _not_ send as
_not_ good for us, and trust Him to send us what is good. Remember all
these things are right, and come with a reason, and a purpose, and a
meaning; and he who grumbles at them believeth not (for the time being at
least) in the Living God.

Ah! do not fancy that I am not often perplexed--"Cast down, yet not in
despair." No; Christ reigns, as Luther used to say--and therefore I will
not fear, "though the mountains be removed (and I with them) and cast
into the midst of the sea."

_Letters and Memories_.

All these anxieties will be good for you. They all go to the making of a
man--calling out that God-dependence in him which is the only true self-
dependence, the only true strength. Well said old Hezekiah, "Lord, by
all _these_ things men live (by trouble, sorrow, sickness), and in these
things is the life of the spirit."

_MS. Letters_.

Our Lord said, "Take no thought for the morrow; the morrow shall take
thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil
thereof." Matt. vi. 34. And do we not find that our Lord's words are
true? Who are the people who get through most work in their lives, with
the least wear and tear? Are they the anxious people? Those who imagine
to themselves possible misfortunes, and ask continually, What if this
happened, or if that? How sho