III.  Still further, another thought may be suggested from these words, or rather from the connection in which they occur, and that is—­Such contented continuance in our place is the dictate of the truest wisdom.

There are two or three collateral topics, partly suggested by the various connections in which this commandment occurs in the chapter, from which I draw the few remarks I have to make now.

And the first point I would suggest is that very old commonplace one, so often forgotten, that after all, though you may change about as much as you like, there is a pretty substantial equipoise and identity in the amount of pain and pleasure in all external conditions.  The total length of day and night all the year round is the same at the North Pole and at the Equator—­half and half.  Only, in the one place, it is half and half for four-and-twenty hours at a time, and in the other, the night lasts through gloomy months of winter, and the day is bright for unbroken weeks of summer.  But, when you come to add them up at the year’s end, the man who shivers in the ice, and the man who pants beneath the beams from the zenith, have had the same length of sunshine and of darkness.  It does not matter much at what degrees between the Equator and the Pole you and I live; when the thing comes to be made up we shall be all pretty much upon an equality.  You do not get the happiness of the rich man over the poor one by multiplying twenty shillings a week by as many figures as will suffice to make it up to L10,000 a year.  What is the use of such eager desires to change our condition, when every condition has disadvantages attending its advantages as certainly as a shadow; and when all have pretty nearly the same quantity of the raw material of pain and pleasure, and when the amount of either actually experienced by us depends not on where we are, but on what we are?

Then, still further, there is another consideration to be kept in mind upon which I do not enlarge, as what I have already said involves it—­namely, that whilst the portion of external pain and pleasure summed up comes pretty much to the same in everybody’s life, any condition may yield the fruit of devout fellowship with God.

Another very remarkable idea suggested by a part of the context is—­What is the need for my troubling myself about outward changes when in Christ I can get all the peculiarities which make any given position desirable to me?  For instance, hear how Paul talks to slaves eager to be set free:  ’For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman:  likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ’s servant.’  If you generalise that principle it comes to this, that in union with Jesus Christ we possess, by our fellowship with Him, the peculiar excellences and blessings that are derivable from external relations of every sort.  To take concrete examples—­if a man is a slave, he may be free in Christ.  If