Think also of the comforting mercy of God.  In the days when men lived five or six or seven hundred years, I suppose that troubles and misfortunes came to them at very great intervals.  Life did not go so fast.  There were not so many vicissitudes; there was not so much jostling.  I suppose that now a man in forty years will have as many vexations and annoyances and hardships and trials and temptations as those antediluvians had in four hundred years.

No one escapes.  If you are not wounded in this side, you must be wounded in that.  There are foes all around about you.  There is no one who has come up to this moment without having been cleft of misfortunes, without having been disappointed and vexed and outraged and trampled on.

The world comes and tries to solace us, but I think the most impotent thing on earth is human comfort when there is no gospel mixed with it.  It is a sham and an insult to a wounded spirit—­all the comfort that this world can offer a man; but in his time of darkness and perplexity and bereavement and persecution and affliction, Christ comes to him with the solace of His Spirit, and He says:  “Oh, thou tempted one, thou shalt not be tempted above that thou art able.”  He tells the invalid, “There is a land where the inhabitants never say, ‘I am sick.’” He says to the assaulted one, “You are no better than I am; they maltreated me, and the servant ought not to expect to have it easier than his Lord.”

He comes to the bereaved one and says:  “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”  And if the trouble be intricate, if there be so many prongs to it, so many horns to it, so many hoofs to it, that he cannot take any of the other promises and comforts of God’s word to his soul, he can take that other promise made for a man in the last emergency and when everything else fails:  “All things work together for good to those that love God.”  Oh, have you never sung of the comforting mercy of God?

Think also of His enthroning mercy.  Notwithstanding there are so many comforts in Christ’s gospel, I do not think that we could stand the assault and rebuff of the world for ever.  We all were so weary of the last war.  It seemed as if those four years were as long as any fifteen or twenty years of our life.  But how could we endure one hundred years, or five hundred years, or a thousand years, of earthly assault?  Methinks the spirit would wear down under the constant chafing and the assault of the world.

Blessed be God, this story of grief and trouble and perplexity will come to an end!  There are twelve gates to heaven, and they are all gates of mercy.  There are paths coming into all those gates, and they are all paths of mercy.  There are bells that ring in the eternal towers, and they are all chimes of mercy.  There are mansions prepared for us in this good land when we have done with the toils of earth, and all those mansions are mansions of mercy.  Can you not now strike upon your soul, saying, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, for thy pardoning mercy, for thy restraining mercy, for thy guiding mercy, for thy comforting mercy, for thy enthroning mercy!”