ed, standing above the bier,
but Richard Cobden called him from his sorrow to become a voice for
the poor, to plead the cause of the opprest, and bring about the Corn
Laws for the hungry workers in the factories and shops. Comfort ye,
comfort ye, my people.

Let the exile say unto himself: "Your warfare is accomplished; your
iniquity is pardoned; the Lord's hand will give unto thee double for
all thy sins that are forgiven." The great faiths and convictions of
the prophets and law-givers, your language and your laws and your
liberties, have not been destroyed by captivity; rather slavery
has saved them. At last you know their value; in contrast with the
idolatry of the Euphrates, the jargon of tongues, the inequality of
rights, the organization of justice and oppression, how wonderful the
equity of the laws of Moses! How beautiful the faith of the fathers!
How surely founded the laws of God. Henceforth idolatry, injustice and
sin became as monstrous in their ugliness as they were wicked in their
essence. Everything else might go, but not the faith of the fathers.
Persecution was like fire on the vase; it burned the colors in. Little
wonder that the tradition tells us that for the next hundred years,
at stated periods, all the people in the land came together, while a
reader repeated this chapter on the unwearied God and the fainting
strength of man that had recovered unto hope, men whose hopes had been
baffled and beaten.

The thought of an unwearied God is also the true antidote to
despondency. The ground of optimism is in God. When that great thinker
described certain people as without God and without hope, there was
sure logic in his phrase, for the Godless man is always the hopeless
man. Between no God anywhere and the one God who is everywhere, there
is no middle ground. Either we are children, buffeted about by fate
and circumstances, with events tossing souls about in an eternal game
of battledore and shuttlecock, or else the world is our Father's
house, and God standeth within the shadow, keeping watch above His
own. For the man who believes in God, who allies himself to nature,
who makes the universe his partner, there is no defeat, and no death,
and no interruption of his prosperity. Concede that there is a God,
and it follows as a logical necessity that He will not permit any
enemy to ruin your life and His plans. For a man who holds this faith
it follows that there can be no defeat, or failure. Indeed, the