And so learn to look upon all trial as being at once the seal of your sonship, and the means by which God puts it within your power to win a higher place, a loftier throne, a nobler crown, a closer fellowship with Him ‘who hath suffered, being tempted,’ and who will receive into His own blessedness and rest them that are tempted.  ’The child, though he be an heir, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; but is under tutors and governors.’  God puts us in the school of sorrow under that stern tutor and governor here, and gives us the opportunity of ‘suffering with Christ,’ that by the daily crucifixion of our old nature, by the lessons and blessings of outward calamities and change, there may grow up in us a still nobler and purer, and perfecter divine life; and that we may so be made capable—­more capable, and capable of more—­of that inheritance for which the only necessary thing is the death of Christ, and the only fitness is faith in His name.

III.  Finally, that inheritance is the necessary result of the suffering that has gone before.

The suffering results from our union with Christ.  That union must needs culminate in glory.  It is not only because the joy hereafter seems required in order to vindicate God’s love to His children, who here reap sorrow from their sonship, that the discipline of life cannot but end in blessedness.  That ground of mere compensation is a low one on which to rest the certainty of future bliss.  But the inheritance is sure to all who here suffer with Christ, because the one cause—­union with the Lord—­produces both the present result of fellowship in His sorrows, and the future result of joy in His joy, of possession of His possessions.  The inheritance is sure because Christ possesses it now.  The inheritance is sure because earth’s sorrows not merely require to be repaid by its peace, but because they have an evident design to fit us for it, and it would be destructive to all faith in God’s wisdom, and God’s knowledge of His own purposes, not to believe that what He has wrought us for will be given to us.  Trials have no meaning, unless they are means to an end.  The end is the inheritance, and sorrows here, as well as the Spirit’s work here, are the earnest of the inheritance.  Measure the greatness of the glory by what has preceded it.  God takes all these years of life, and all the sore trials and afflictions that belong inevitably to an earthly career, and works them in, into the blessedness that shall come.  If a fair measure of the greatness of any result of productive power be the length of time that was taken for getting it ready, we can dimly conceive what that joy must be for which seventy years of strife and pain and sorrow are but a momentary preparation; and what must be the weight of that glory which is the counterpoise and consequence to the afflictions of this lower world.  The further the pendulum swings on the one side, the further it goes up on the