There is no need, in order to rise to the full height of the Christian contempt for calamity, to deny any of its terrible power.  These things can separate us from much.  They can separate us from joy, from hope, from almost all that makes life desirable.  They can strip us to the very quick, but the quick they cannot touch.  The frost comes and kills the flowers, browns the leaves, cuts off the stems, binds the sweet music of the flowing rivers in silent chains, casts mists and darkness over the face of the solitary grey world, but it does not touch the life that is in the root.

And so all these outward sorrows that have power over the whole of the outward life, and can slay joy and all but stifle hope, and can ban men into irrevocable darkness and unalleviated solitude, they do not touch in the smallest degree the secret bond that binds the heart to Jesus, nor in any measure affect the flow of His love to us.  Therefore we may front them and smile at them and say: 

  ’Do as thou wilt, devouring time,
  With this wide world, and all its fading sweets’;

’my flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.’

You need not be very much afraid of anything being taken from you as long as Christ is left you.  You will not be altogether hopeless so long as Christ, who is our hope, still speaks His faithful promises to you, nor will the world be lonely and dark to them who feel that they are lapt in the sweet and all-pervading consciousness of the changeless love of the heart of Christ.  ’Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution?’—­in any of these things, ’we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.’  Brethren, that is the Christian way of looking at all externals, not only at the dark and the sorrowful, but at the bright and the gladsome.  If the withdrawal of external blessings does not touch the central sanctities and sweetness of a life in communion with Jesus, the bestowal of external blessedness does not much brighten or gladden it.  We can face the withdrawal of them all, we need not covet the possession of them all, for we have all in Christ; and the world without His love contributes less to our blessedness and our peace than the absence of all its joys with His love does.  So let us feel that earth, in its givings and in its withholdings, is equally impotent to touch the one thing that we need, the conscious possession of the love of Christ.

All these foes, as I have said, have no power over the fact of Christ’s love to us, but they have power, and a very terrible power, over our consciousness of that love; and we may so kick against the pricks as to lose, in the pain of our sorrows, the assurance of His presence, or be so fascinated by the false and vulgar sweetnesses and promises of the world as, in the eagerness of our chase after them, to lose our sense of the all-sufficing certitude of His love.  Tribulation does not strip us of His love, but tribulation