How profoundly mysterious, as yet, to ourselves, is our own individual history!  If we attempt to gather up the past, and to trace the whole way along which we have journeyed, with the innumerable windings of the path, and all the dark valleys through which it has led, the rugged places it has passed over, or the many lofty hills up which it has ascended,—­how endless, how perplexing does it appear!  If, again, we try to measure the various powers which have helped to make us what we are, or to weigh the number and relative importance of all the things which have combined to produce the present result of character within, and of circumstances without us,—­how soon are we lost amidst the mass of the infinite items which make up the sum of even our little history.  How inadequate are all our attempts to solve the problems without number which every year suggests. Why, for example, has this or that happened?  Wherefore this sorrow or that joy?—­why such changes of place or of fortune?—­why the loss of old friends or the gift of new ones?—­why—­But the questions are endless, and never can be answered till judgment.  It is true, that we are often privileged to see very clearly the reason of many of Christ’s dealings with us here.  He shews us His ways as well as His acts—­treating us as “friends” who “know what their Lord doeth.”  The wheel of Providence often makes its revolutions in so short a period that we see the whole movement.  It was thus in the case of Abraham.  The mystery of God’s command was resolved after three days on Mount Moriah.  Thus, too, the darkness of family grief and of a distant Saviour, which brooded over the household of Bethany, was dispelled, and vanished before bright sunshine, at the cry, “Lazarus, come forth!” But it is not always thus; and though it would be so more frequently if we waited more patiently upon God and considered His ways, yet, at best, but a small fraction of our life is understood here.  Moreover, our own history is so interlaced with the history of others, that what is more properly theirs, in some degree is ours also.  Can Moses, for instance, yet fully comprehend his own life in its relation to the Jewish nation, whose fate is still involved in darkness?  Can any one of the saints of old, whose deeds and words are recorded in God’s Book, and are telling every day and hour upon the history of mankind, and must continue to do so till time shall be no more, comprehend what they really have done on earth?  Must not the end of all things come before they understand the place and the work their Lord assigned to them?  And so is it with the humblest believer.  He is a part of a great whole; and to understand how Jesus has governed Himself as a part, he must be able to see his own life in relation to the great whole.  But each Christian who has walked by faith, and held fast his confidence in Christ, will then also have revealed how the Lord has governed him, and all that He has done to him and for him, and what He has enabled