old prophet and you said, "After all, we are
very much alike. After all, he got in the dumps, fretted and broke his
heart with the blues, even as I."

Now, what was the matter with Elijah? He was not a natural and
deliberate pessimist. There are some folks that are, you know. There
are some people who study to be pessimistic. They are the
"self-appointed inspectors of warts and carbuncles, the self-elected
supervisors of sewers and street gutters." They pride themselves on
being guides to the Slough of Despond and on holding a pass key to the
cave of Giant Despair.

One such woman, being asked how she felt, said, "I feel good to-day.
But I always feel the worst when I feel the best because I know how bad
I am going to feel when I get to feeling bad again." Two buckets went
to a well one day. One sobbed and said, "Oh, me! it breaks my heart to
think that however full we go away from the well, we always come back
empty." And its companion laughed outright and said, "Why, I was
congratulating myself on the fact that however empty we come to the
well, we always go away full."

One morning when the world was brimming with spring, two little girls
ran out into a garden where the dewdrops and the sunlight and God had
wrought the miracle of a hundred full-blown roses. They looked at the
lovely scene and one went back and said tearfully, "Oh, mother, the
roses are blooming, but there is a thorn for every rose." The other
looked and went back singing and said, "Mother, the roses are blooming
and there is a rose for every thorn."

No, this man was not a deliberate pessimist. Had he been his name and
memory would have rotted long ago, for the men that bless us are the
hopeful men, the forward-looking men. I read of a man who was put in
jail during the Boer War simply because he was always prophesying
disaster. He was a discourager. He refused to see anything hopeful.
And a man of that kind ought to be in jail because he is as harmful as
a man with the small-pox. "He who steals my purse steals trash, but he
who filcheth from me" my sunny outlook, my expectation of the dawn of a
to-morrow, "takes that which not enriches him, but makes me poor
indeed."

What was the matter with Elijah? Well, in the first place, he was
tired. He was utterly spent. He had just passed through a very trying
and exacting ordeal. We can well imagine that the days just preceding
the test upon Carmel were toilsome days and the nights