redemption that is preached by his church. The fountains of joy are dried. What a church can do for faith, God, who is not adequately interpreted by any church, can do far better. It is not faith in a church, but in a God who has redeemed us, that can save the joy and nobility of life. Enlargement of the capacity for intelligent faith will become tributary to the happiness of the world.

Thirdly, its use and power in practical life or in the domain of action. Faith lies at the root of all practical virtues. Christianity in making faith central in ethical life interprets all best ethical experience. The men of achievement have always been men of faith. What men need, when the difficulties of life crowd upon them, is what the disciples needed and asked of their Master, increase of faith. He whose faith is strong is strong enough to support the faith of others. Faith is the root of fidelity. He who trusts and is strong is the one whom others will trust. He who finds his own foundation sure and rests upon it will make a foundation upon which others may rest. This, too, is the patient man who endures when hardships come. Faith takes hold of an object which it recognizes as good, and having taken hold it holds on. And faith holding on to the good in the midst of evil is patience. Patience is self-perpetuating trust. It is faith enduring to the end. True faith is moral steadfastness. "Steadfast by faith" is the Christian's definition of patience. In it the soul keeps itself to the object of its trust. Doubt is a parley with difficulty. Despair is surrender to it. Faith, holding firmly to the good that lies beyond all earthly difficulty and barrier, is the patience that insures victory. Who is he that endures but the one who trusting the good he cannot see, a good that is not the less real though it be unseen, waits for it? And this, too, is the courageous man who is not only strong to wait but strong to achieve. Faith is vantage-ground for the fight. He who fights well must feel that he has something under and about him that he can trust. Hardship brings a man to a stand. It throws him back upon something that will stand by him. He who rallies against the

onset of gigantic difficulties must rally from the basis of something to which he is self-committed in mental and moral confidence. No man can fight difficulties in the air. Perpetual doubt or distrust is moral imbecility. In the presence of difficulty one sees as never otherwise how necessary it is to believe in something. Faith that takes hold on God and redemption is at the foundation of the loftiest courage this world has ever What Christianity has done for the courage of the world can never be adequately estimated. Faith as a working force in the battle of life is a theme that demands a treatise. What is left of the optimism of modern life allies itself with this working force that Christianity has brought into and left in the world.

seen.

In a final word, then, the modern world needs more faith in faith. It is a simple thing, but it is a power that removes the mountain barriers of life. Man is weak, but the power that made and upholds and redeems is committed to him, and will see him safely through. The wisdom and the strength of life are in self-committal to Him.

The Ministry of Trouble and Sorrow.

THE
Τ

PROF. J. M. STIFLER, D.D., Crosier Seminary, Chester, Pa.

HERE is no house without a roof; no part of the house so carefully kept in repair. For the summer's sun scorches the unprotected head, and storms of rain and snow and hail are sure to come. He who enters life with no shield against sorrow and trouble has moved into a house without a roof.

The heart that never aches is not a human heart. Pain is inseparable from mortal life. It may not be constant, but it is inevitable. The mind struggles with mysteries which it cannot solve; bereavements bruise and cut the tendrils of affection; the body suffers from disease; the will is racked by disappointments, and the conscience is often blistered by remorse. And while one has a mind to think, a heart to love, nerves to feel, a will to determine, and a conscience to speak for God,-that is, while one is a man, he is exposed to suffering on every side. Job had lived long and was prosperous. He said, "I shall die in my nest." But he bitterly learned his mistake, for as there is none that lives and sins not, so there is none that lives and suffers not. The origin of suffering may be mysterious and its object in particular cases far from certain, but of the fact there is absolutely no question.

But if no good came from it, pain would disprove the benevolence of God. The swamps and marshes that breed fevers and malaria grow also lilies, and some of the sweetest of them grow nowhere else. The bitter loss of Jacob's favorite son was the only means of restoring him to the patriarch a prince. The hammer that breaks the hull of the nut gives you its sweet kernel. The diamond cannot shine until it is cut. And it is

diamonds that are cut, not pebbles. And so no pain is malignant. It is not always even a penalty, but the price without which excellence cannot be bought.

"Heaven is not mounted to on wings of dreams,
Nor doth the unthankful happiness of youth
Aim thitherward, but floats from bloom to bloom,
With earth's warm patch of sunshine well content.
'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up,
Whose golden rounds are our calamities,
Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God

The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed."

-LOWELL.

Now, he who does not expect to be exempt from pain, who also believes that in some way it is beneficent, has a covering to which to resort in the storm. "The whole wisdom and magnanimity of life consist in a will conformed to what is, with a heart ready for what is not." Pain is often wisdom's handboard pointing to a better, safer path. Sorrow is homeopathic. We are given little doses to cure us of greater ills. The loss of a hand spares us the loss of the arm. There are griefs that no prudence and no forethought can either avoid or avert. But there are others also which none but fools suffer more than

once.

Sorrows and disappointments influence character tremendously. Nothing has more weight on the aim of life. Much of our thinking and planning goes to shun what is considered life's woes. The weak man often succumbs before these, and with the slander against the Creator in his heart, that life is not worth living, gives way to melancholy, moroseness, despair, or suicide. The stoic is little better. He receives his own ills with clinched teeth and defiant indifference, and looks with tearless apathy on those of others. Hearts were made to ache, and it is divinely intended that they may improve by the pain. Solomon says, "By the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better." And of a greater than Solomon we read, "Though he was a son yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered," and was made "perfect through sufferings." Failure

and disappointment have generally taught the earnest man his choicest lessons. One of these, an American poet, says :

"Nor deem the irrevocable past

As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If rising on its wrecks at last

To something nobler we attain."

Bereavement makes the heart tender and sympathetic; confidence betrayed leads to wiser caution; sickness suggests more care of health; failure in business teaches better methods, and sin, unless one loves it, by soiling the conscience leads to the Cleanser.

Sorrow confers a value which nothing else can give. Value is more than the product of labor. There are price marks higher than any ever reached by toil. Men esteem highest that worthy thing for which they have suffered most. Christ not. only died for men because he loves them, but he doubly loves them because he died for them. Liberties, political, social, religious, are so precious because they were all bought with blood. The sufferings of the early colonists and of the Revolutionary fathers at Valley Forge endear this nation to their children. Dollars are but dust, and nothing that dollars can buy is worth much. The precious things of life come to men only through pain-pain of body, brain, and heart.

Sorrows give an excellent opportunity for the exercise of the highest virtues. It was the lepers of Molokai that made Father Damien a hero. If the traveler going down from Jerusalem to Jericho had not fallen among thieves, the priest and the Levite would not have lost their reputation and the good Samaritan would not have made his. He who lives only to escape or to surmount his own allotted sufferings may be a prudent man but he is basely selfish. He who can bear another's griefs is like him who was the normal man, who suffered much himself that all others might suffer less.