softly about the dead; though we know full well that some of the best
men that ever lived, in a fit of insanity, or under depression quite
impossible for them to control, have passed, by their own hand, out of
this world, yet we cannot hide from ourselves that self-destruction is
an act of cowardice, that where men and women break down is not in
physical courage, but in moral courage, and that those lines penned
long ago are true to-day:

"When all the blandishments of life are gone,
The coward slinks to death, the brave live on!"

But we need not go to such an exceptional occurrence as that to find a
field for this exercise of moral courage. Take all those incidents of
life which happen day after day--the little child snatched from us in
all its beauty and its innocence: the bright lad shot upon the field of
battle in a moment, taken away with all his brightness, and his
laughter, and his merriment; the man who loses in middle life his money
and has to begin the hard struggle of saving all over again--how are we
to explain it? What can we say to light up in any degree so vast a
problem? There is, my dear brothers and sisters, I believe, no full
explanation here, but there is a belief which comforts us, and that is,
that these calamities of life are all being used for a great purpose;
that when the Scripture says of God that "He sits as a refiner and
purifier of silver," it does give us some sort of clue which nerves us
to bear what we have to bear. Those who pass from us, pass, we
believe, into what has been called, "God's great Convalescent Home" in
another world, but to us who have to suffer, who receive these strokes,
the suffering is not useless; it is a furnace which has to fashion that
heavenly tempered thing which we call "moral courage," and to produce
it any suffering is worth bearing. Do think over that, you who may be
going through the furnace now, do remember that you have not lost that
lad, that child, for ever, that it is only a few years until you see
him again; but, meanwhile, while he is prepared there, you are being
prepared here. The character is everything, and if there can be
produced in you and in me that moral courage which makes us like our
Saviour, we shall not be sorry for it in the days to come.

And so, again, take that awful trial which comes at times of having to
suffer under a false accusation. I saw someone this week whom I
believe to be lying under a most terrible accus