One of the earliest heathen notions why troubles came was, it seems, that the gods were offended with men, because they had not shown them due honour, flattered them enough, or offered sacrifices enough to them:  or else they fancied that the gods envied men:  grudged their prosperity, did not like to see them too happy.

That dark and base notion gradually faded away, as men got higher notions of right and wrong, and of the gods, as the judges and avengers of wrong.  Then they began to think these troubles were punishments for doing wrong.  The Gods, or God, punished sin; inflicting so much pain for so much sin, very much as the heathens are apt to punish their criminals still, and as Christian nations used to punish theirs, namely, with shameful and horrible tortures; before they began to find out that the end of punishment is not to torment, but to reform, the criminal, wherever it is possible.

But then the thought would come—­Why, after all, should God, if he be just and merciful, punish my sin by pain and misery?  How can it profit God, how can it please God, to give me pain?  Because it satisfies his justice?  How can it do that?  It would not satisfy mine.  Suppose my child, or even my dog, disobeyed me, would it satisfy my sense of justice to beat him?  It might satisfy my passion:  but God has no passions.  It would be base, blasphemous to fancy that he takes pleasure in hurting me, as I take pleasure in beating my dog when I lose my temper with it.  God forbid!  The old prophets saw that, and cried—­’Have I any pleasure in the death of him, saith the Lord, and not rather that he should turn from his wickedness, and live?’

Then, naturally, the thought would come into the mind of a wise and serious man—­I punish my child, or my dog, and God punishes me.  May he not punish me for the same reason that I punish them?  I punish them to correct them and make them better.  Surely God punishes me, to correct me, and make me better.  I punish my child, because I love him, and wish him good.  God punishes me because he loves me and desires that I may be a partaker of his holiness.

And as soon as that blessed thought had risen up in any man’s mind, by the inspiration of God’s Holy Spirit, all the world would begin to look bright and clear and full of hope.  This earth, with all its sorrows and sufferings, would look no longer to him as God’s prison house, where poor sinners sat tortured and wailing, fast bound in misery and iron, till they should pay the uttermost farthing, which they never could pay.  No.  It would look to him as God’s school-house, God’s reformatory, in which he is training and chastening and correcting the souls of men, that he may deliver them from the ruin and misery which sin brings on them, both the original sin which is born in them and the actual sin which they commit.  Then God appears to him a gracious and merciful father.  He can see a blessed meaning and a wholesome use in all human suffering; and he can break out, as the Psalmist does in this glorious psalm, into praise and thanksgiving, and call on mankind to give thanks to the Lord; for he is gracious, and his mercy endureth for ever.