Himself.  Most men seem to think that they have gone to the very bottom of the thing when they have classified the gifts of fortune as good or evil, according as they produce pleasure or pain.  But that is a poor, superficial classification.  It is like taking and arranging books by their bindings and flowers by their colours.  Instead of saying, ’We divide life into two halves, and we put there all the joyful, and here all the sad, for that is the ruling distinction’—­let us rather say, ’The whole is one, because it all comes from one purpose, and it all tends towards one end.  The only question worth asking in regard to the externals of our life is—­How far does each thing help me to be a good man? how far does it open my understanding to apprehend Him? how far does it make my spirit pliable and plastic under His touch? how far does it make me capable of larger reception of greater gifts from Himself? what is its effect in preparing me for that world beyond?’ Is there any other greater, more satisfying, more majestic thought of life than this—­the scaffolding by which souls are built up into the temple of God?  And to care whether a thing is painful or pleasant is as absurd as to care whether the bricklayer’s trowel is knocking the sharp corner off a brick, or plastering mortar on the one below it before he lays it carefully on its course.  Is the building getting on?  That is the one question that is worth thinking about.

You and I write our lives as if on one of those manifold writers which you use.  A thin filmy sheet here, a bit of black paper below it; but the writing goes through upon the next page, and when the blackness that divides two worlds is swept away there, the history of each life written by ourselves remains legible in eternity.  And the question is—­What sort of autobiography are we writing for the revelation of that day, and how far do our circumstances help us to transcribe fair in our lives the will of our God and the image of our Redeemer?

If, then, we have once got hold of that principle that all which is—­summer and winter, storm and sunshine, possession and loss, memory and hope, work and rest, and all the other antitheses of life—­is equally the product of His will, equally the manifestation of His mind, equally His means for our discipline, then we have the amulet and talisman which will preserve us from the fever of desire and the shivering fits of anxiety as to things which perish.  And, as they tell of a Christian father who, riding by one of the great lakes of Switzerland all day long, on his journey to the Church Council that was absorbing his thoughts, said towards evening to the deacon who was pacing beside him, ‘Where is the lake?’ so you and I, journeying along by the margin of this great flood of things when wild storms sweep across it, or when the sunbeams glint upon its blue waters, ‘and birds of peace sit brooding on the charmed wave,’ will be careless of the changeful sea, if the eye looks beyond the visible and beholds the unseen, the unchanging real presences that make glory in the darkest lives, and ‘sunshine in the shady place.’  ’Let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God.’