We may wonder at these things:  but when we consider them as ordered of God, the consideration, should calm our minds, and bring us to say with the astonished Shunamite of old, “It is well.” *

* 2 Kings iv. 26.

God doth not order sorrows to his creatures here, because he delights in their sufferings.  “He grieves not willingly, neither afflicts the children of men.  He doth it for their profit, that they may be partakers of his holiness.”  And which of the saints hath not received benefit from it?  Who among them hath not sometimes been ready to adopt the language of the psalmist, “It is good for me, that I have been afflicted.”

“Born of the earth, we are earthly”—­our afflictions naturally descend.  We are prone to set our affections on temporal things, and set up our rest where there is no abiding.  Therefore do we need afflictions to keep us mindful of our situation.  Such remains of depravity are left in the renewed, that prosperity often corrupts them.  But for the sorrows and sufferings ordered out to them, they would forget God and lose themselves among the deceitful cares, and infatuating allurements of this strange land.

Intervals of comfort are also needful for them.  Were these denied them, “the spirits would fail before God, and the souls which he hath made.”  And intervals of light and joy are given to refresh and cheer, and animate them to the duties required in this land of darkness and doubt.  But they are not intended to satisfy.  They answer like ends to the Christian during his earthly pilgrimage, as the fruits of Canaan, carried by the spies into the wilderness did to Israel while journeying toward the land of promise—­serve to give them a glance of the good things prepared for them, to increase their longings after them, and animate them to press forward and make their way to the possession.

Such may be some of the reasons of those varied scenes through which the people of God are doomed to make their way to glory.

Often the saints find themselves unable to penetrate the design of heaven in the trials through which lies their way—­especially in the hidings of God’s face, so that they cannot discover him.  This made no small part of Job’s trial—­“Behold I go forward but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him; on the left hand where he doth work, but I cannot behold him; he hideth himself on the right hand that I cannot see him.”  Could he have known the reasons of his trials it would have been a great consolations, but it was denied him, and the reasons of God’s hiding his face from him, no less than those of his other trials.