In every kind of human suffering, I say, he sees now a meaning and a use.

First, he takes, it seems, his own countrymen, the Jews, coming back from Babylon into their own country after the seventy years’ captivity.  They had been punished for their sins.  But for what purpose?  That they might know (as Ezekiel said), that God was the Lord.  And when they cried unto him in their trouble, he delivered them out of their distress.

Then he goes on to those who have brought themselves into poverty and shame, and sit fast bound in misery and iron.  It is their own fault.  They have brought it on themselves by rebelling against the word of the Lord, and lightly regarding the counsel of the Most Highest.  But God does not hate them.  God is not going to leave them to the net which they have spread for their own feet.  When they cry unto the Lord in their troubles, he delivers them out of their distress.  God himself, by strange and unexpected ways, will deliver them from their darkness of ignorance and sin, and from the danger and misery which they have brought upon themselves.

Then he goes on to those who have injured their health by their own folly, till their soul abhors all manner of food, and they are even hard at death’s door.  Neither does God hate them.  They, too, are in God’s school-house.  And when they cry to the Lord in their trouble, he will deliver them, too, out of their distress, and send his word, and heal them, and save them from destruction.

Then he goes on to men who are exposed to danger, and terror, and death in their lawful calling; and his instance is the seamen—­those who go on to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters.

The storms come up, they know not when or how:  but they are not the sport of a blind chance; they are not the victims of the wrath of God.  The wild sea, too, is his school-house, where they are to see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep; and so, by strange dangers and strange deliverances, learn, as I have seen many a seaman learn, a courage and endurance, a faith, a resignation, which puts us comfortable landsmen to shame.

Then he goes on to even a deeper matter—­to those terrible changes in nature, so common in the East, in which whole districts, by earthquake or drought, are rendered worthless and barren.  They too, he says, are God’s lessons, though sharp ones enough.  ’He turneth the rivers into a wilderness, and the water-springs into dry ground; a fruitful land into barrenness, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein.  Again, he turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into water-springs.  And there he maketh the hungry to dwell, that they may prepare a city for habitation; and sow the fields, and plant vineyards, which may yield fruits of increase.’