by small temptations, if we do not call it into exercise on small occasions. Let this be remembered in the common walks of life. Let it be remembered in the daily occupations of the household, and in all our intercourse one with another.

Christian communion and sympathy is of great value and comfort to a tempted soul. It is especially in spiritual things that as iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. But there are cases in which a man hardly dares believe that ever any other person experienced such assaults and evils as his own soul has to pass through. There are cases in which he is very unwilling to repose confidence in any human being, and can go to none but God. And sometimes the more exclusively he is shut up to God, the better.

There is an affecting and instructive delineation in the picture drawn by Bunyan of Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. When Christian had travelled in this disconsolate condition some considerable time, he thought he heard the voice of a man going before him, saying, Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will fear no ill, for thou art with me. Then was he glad, and that for these reasons. First, because he gathered from thence that some who feared God were in this valley as well as himself. Secondly, for that he perceived God was with them, though in that dark and dismal state; and why not, thought he, with me; though by reason of the impediment that attends this place I cannot perceive it. Thirdly, for that he hoped, could he overtake them, to have company by and by. So he went on, and called to him that was before; but he knew not what to answer for that he also thought himself to be alone. And by and by the day broke. Then said Christian, "He hath turned the shadow of death into the morning." And thus is God able at any time to turn the shadow of death into the morning. When he giveth peace, who then can make trouble? But until he be pleased to give peace, the soul

must trust submissively to him, even in the darkness. Because there seems to be no light, but only darkness, that may not be any positive proof that God is not with the soul. The soul may not be able to perceive it, by reason, as Bunyan expresses it, of the impediment that attends the place; and yet God may be guiding and blessing the soul, even in such thick darkness. When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, said David in such a case, then THOU knewest my path.

God of my life, to thee I call,
Afflicted at thy feet I fall,

When the great water-floods prevail,
Leave not my trembling heart to fail.
Friend of the friendless and the faint!
Where should I lodge my deep complaint?
Where but with thee, whose open door
Invites the helpless and the poor!

Did ever mourner plead with thee
And thou refuse that mourner's plea?
Does not the word still fixed remain
That none shall seek thy face in vain?
That were a grief I could not bear,
Didst thou not hear and answer prayer;
But a prayer-hearing, answering God
Supports me under every load.

Fair is the lot that's cast for me;
I have an advocate with thee;
They whom the world caresses most
Have no such privilege to boast.
Poor though I am, despised, forgot,
Yet God, my God, forgets me not,
And he is safe, and must succeed,
For whom the Lord vouchsafes to plead

CHAPTER XV.

Faith still put to the test.-Is it faith in sight, or faith in God?—Three days in the wilderness.-Light out of darkness, strength out of weakness.-The discovery of God in self-disappointment and abasement.

And a man does

It is a great thing to learn to trust God. not learn it, ordinarily, till he passes through affliction, and oftentimes he has to experience much affliction in order to learn. He has to be stripped of his self-reliance, and the props and crutches, on which he has supported himself and his virtues, have to be taken away, together with the dear things in which he trusted for comfort and happiness; and then it is to be seen whether his soul relies on God. A man may have the principle of reliance, but habits of reliance are not to be formed at once; and so a man may have the principle of submission, but the habit of submission, the grace of resignation, is a thing of time and discipline and gradual formation. It is easy to trust God in prosperity, and a man may think he has formed the habit of trusting him; but let him be overwhelmed with adversity, and then how often does he find his piety deserting him, and that he has yet to learn this simple lesson of dependence on God.

We have said that inward trials are sometimes better at the very commencement of one's Christian course than ever, more experience being gained from them then, than ever afterwards. Yet it is not till the lapse of some time, ordinarily, that the soul fearns to read and understand

such trials aright. And always the soul is a learner, as a little child, and even old lessons are new ones.

O let me then at length be taught
What I am still so slow to learn,
That God is Love, and changes not
Nor knows the shadow of a turn.

Sweet truth, and easy to repeat!
But when my faith is sharply tried,
I find myself a learner yet,

Unskilful, weak, and apt to slide.

We find it recorded immediately after the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt, that they went three days in the wilderness, and found no water. It was a sharp and sudden teaching of their dependence on God. Three days in the wilderness and no water! A multitude of some hundreds of thousands of people must have suffered much under these circumstances. To realize their suffering, to have an adequate idea of it, we should need to be put in their situation, beneath a burning sun, a cloudless sky, surrounded by the bare, dry, grey, shining desert. Three days and no water! This seemed indeed a deplorable commencement of their journey. They thought, when God had brought them safely through the Red Sea, that that was the way in which he would cause them to triumph continually. They knew very little of themselves, still less of God. They knew very little of God's methods of discipline, very little of their own need of that discipline. They could sing God's praises, on occasion of a great deliverance, provided Moses would prepare an ode for them; just as the most careless and irreligious of men might pray to God with the voice, if a form of prayer were prepared and printed for them, without the least degree or beginning of the Spirit of prayer in their hearts. But their obligations to God and their dependence upon him they had scarcely begun to realize. All the discipline of faith they were yet

to experience. They were just entering on a school, the lessons of which were to be of forty years' duration. Probably they thought, when the Red Sea was between them and their enemies, and they had beheld Pharaoh and his host (for dread of whom they had stood shivering) all whelmed in the returning billows, that now there was no more for them to do, but just to march straight, without hindrance or difficulty, into the promised land of freedom and of plenty. Little did they know how little they were Little did they know what there was in

prepared for it. their own hearts.

And therefore, after the first triumph, after God had brought them safely out of Egypt, and across the Red Sea, their first experience was trial and disappointment. The course which they thought was to be one of constant advancement and victory, they speedily found to be one of self-mortification and delay. They plunged at once into the wilderness; not a wilderness in our sense of the term, which to them would have been comparative security and repose; not a region of wild woods and thick pathless shades of the undisturbed primeval forest; but an open, uninhabitable, barren, parched desert, which to most of them, who had scarcely ever stirred from the green banks of the Nile in Goshen, must have been a strange and gloomy experience. Such is the first disclosure of self to a soul escaping from its native city of destruction. Such is sometimes the early unexpected experience of the converted soul setting out on its pilgrimage to heaven. Such, too, is sometimes the experience of old saints in new Christian enterprises.

And they wandered on three days through this desert, and found no water. They began to forget and almost to doubt their experience of God's mercy at the Red Sea, though as yet they did not go so far in their murmurings as to accuse Moses of having brought them into the wilderness to perish with hunger. But now they are coming to a green spot, and certainly there will be water.