Grecian mythology said that the fountain of Hippocrene was struck out by the foot of the winged horse Pegasus.  I have often noticed in life that the brightest and most beautiful fountains of Christian comfort and spiritual life have been struck out by the iron-shod hoof of disaster and calamity.  I see Daniel’s courage best by the flash of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.  I see Paul’s prowess best when I find him on the foundering ship under the glare of the lightning in the breakers of Melita.  God crowns His children amid the howling of wild beasts and the chopping of blood-splashed guillotine and the crackling fires of martyrdom.  It took the persecutions of Marcus Aurelius to develop Polycarp and Justin Martyr.  It took the pope’s bull and the cardinal’s curse and the world’s anathema to develop Martin Luther.  It took all the hostilities against the Scotch Covenanters and the fury of Lord Claverhouse to develop James Renwick, and Andrew Melville, and Hugh McKail, the glorious martyrs of Scotch history.  It took the stormy sea, and the December blast, and the desolate New England coast, and the war-whoop of savages, to show forth the prowess of the Pilgrim Fathers—­

    “When amid the storms they sung,
      And the stars heard, and the sea,
    And the sounding aisles of the dim wood
      Rang to the anthems of the free.”

It took all our past national distresses, and it takes all our present national sorrows, to lift up our nation on that high career where it will march along after the foreign aristocracies that have mocked and the tyrannies that have jeered, shall be swept down under the omnipotent wrath of God, who hates despotism, and who, by the strength of His own red right arm, will make all men free.  And so it is individually, and in the family, and in the Church, and in the world, that through darkness and storm and trouble men, women, churches, nations, are developed.

II.  Again, I see in my text the beauty of unfaltering friendship.  I suppose there were plenty of friends for Naomi while she was in prosperity; but of all her acquaintances, how many were willing to trudge off with her toward Judah, when she had to make that lonely journey?  One—­the heroine of my text.  One—­absolutely one.  I suppose when Naomi’s husband was living, and they had plenty of money, and all things went well, they had a great many callers; but I suppose that after her husband died, and her property went, and she got old and poor, she was not troubled very much with callers.  All the birds that sung in the bower while the sun shone have gone to their nests, now the night has fallen.

Oh, these beautiful sun-flowers that spread out their color in the morning hour! but they are always asleep when the sun is going down!  Job had plenty of friends when he was the richest man in Uz; but when his property went and the trials came, then there were none so much that pestered as Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite.