I thank you so much for your letter about your precious children.  I remember them well, all three, and do not wonder that the death of your first-born, coming upon the very footsteps of sorrow, has so nearly crushed you.  But what beautiful consolations God gave you by his dying bed!  “All safe at God’s right hand!” What more can the fondest mother’s heart ask than such safety as this?  I am sure that there will come to you, sooner or later, the sense of Christ’s love in these repeated sorrows, that in your present bewildered, amazed state you can hardly realise.  Let me tell you that I have tried His heart in a long storm—­not so very different from yours—­and that I know something of its depths.  I will enclose you some lines that may give you a moment’s light.  Please not to let them go out of your hands, for no one—­not even my husband—­has ever seen them.  I am going to send my last book to your lonely little boy.  You will not feel like reading it now, but perhaps the 33d chapter, and some that follow, may not jar upon you as the earlier part would.

To go back again to the subject of Christ’s love for us, of which I never tire, I want to make you feel that His sufferers are His happiest, most favored disciples.  What they learn about Him—–­His pitifulness, His unwillingness to hurt us, His haste to bind up the very wounds He has inflicted—–­endear Him so, that at last they burst out into songs of thanksgiving, that His “donation of bliss” included in it such donation of pain.  Perhaps I have already said to you, for I am fond of saying it,

  “The love of Jesus—–­what it is,
  Only His sufferers know.”

You ask if your heart will ever be lightsome again.  Never again with the lightsomeness that had never known sorrow, but light even to gayety with the new and higher love born of tribulation.  Just as far as a heavenly is superior even to maternal love, will be the elevation and beauty of your new joy; a joy worth all it costs.  I know what sorrow means; I know it well.  But I know, too, what it is to pass out of that prison-house into a peace that passes all understanding; and thousands can say the same.  So, my dear suffering sister, look on and look up; lay hold on Christ with both your poor, empty hands; let Him do with you what seemeth Him good; though He slay you, still trust in Him; and I dare in His name to promise you a sweeter, better life than you could have known had He left you to drink of the full, dangerous cups of unmingled prosperity.  I feel such real and living sympathy with you, that I would love to spend weeks by your side, trying to bind up your broken heart.  But for the gospel of Christ, to hear of such bereavements as yours would appall, would madden one.  Yet, what a halo surrounds that word “but”!

To Miss E. A. Warner, New York, Dec 14, 1870.