The trouble which we bear rightly with God’s help, gives new hope.  If we have made our sorrow an occasion for learning, by living experience, somewhat more of His exquisitely varied and ever ready power to aid and bless, then it will teach us firmer confidence in these inexhaustible resources which we have thus once more proved, ’Tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope.’  That is the order.  You cannot put patience and experience into a parenthesis, and omitting them, bring hope out of tribulation.  But if, in my sorrow, I have been able to keep quiet because I have had hold of God’s hand, and if in that unstruggling submission I have found that from His hand I have been upheld, and had strength above mine own infused into me, then my memory will give the threads with which Hope weaves her bright web.  I build upon two things—­God’s unchangeableness, and His help already received; and upon these strong foundations I may wisely and safely rear a palace of Hope, which shall never prove a castle in the air.  The past, when it is God’s past, is the surest pledge for the future.  Because He has been with us in six troubles, therefore we may be sure that in seven He will not forsake us.  I said that the light of hope was the brightness from the face of God.  I may say again, that the light of hope which fills our sky is like that which, on happy summer nights, lives till morning in the calm west, and with its colourless, tranquil beauty, tells of a yesterday of unclouded splendour, and prophesies a to-morrow yet more abundant.  The glow from a sun that is set, the experience of past deliverances, is the truest light of hope to light our way through the night of life.

One of the psalms gives us, in different form, a metaphor and a promise substantially the same as that of this text.  ’Blessed are the men who, passing through the valley of weeping, make it a well.’  They gather their tears, as it were, into the cisterns by the wayside, and draw refreshment and strength from their very sorrows, and then, when thus we in our wise husbandry have irrigated the soil with the gathered results of our sorrows, the heavens bend over us, and weep their gracious tears, and ‘the rain also covereth it with blessings.’  No chastisement for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness.’

Then, dear friends, let us set ourselves with our loins girt to the road.  Never mind how hard it may be to climb.  The slope of the valley of trouble is ever upwards.  Never mind how dark is the shadow of death which stretches athwart it.  If there were no sun there would be no shadow; presently the sun will be right overhead, and there will be no shadow then.  Never mind how black it may look ahead, or how frowning the rocks.  From between their narrowest gorge you may see, if you will, the guide whom God has sent you, and that Angel of Hope will light up all the darkness, and will only fade away when she is lost in the sevenfold brightness of that upper land, whereof our ’God Himself is Sun and Moon’—­the true Canaan, to whose everlasting mountains the steep way of life has climbed at last through valleys of trouble, and of weeping, and of the shadow of death.