It is not in the great tragedies of life only that character is tested and strengthened and consolidated.  No man who is not himself under God’s moral and spiritual instruments could believe how often in the quietest, clearest, and least tempestuous day he has the chance and the call to say, Yea, Lord, Thy will be done.  And, then, when the confessedly tragic days and nights come, when all men admit that this is Gethsemane indeed, the practised soul is able, with a calmness and a peace that confound and offend the bystanders, to say, to act so that he does not need to say, Not my will, but Thine.  And so of all the other forms and features of moral character; so of humility and meekness, so of purity and temperance, so of magnanimity and munificence, so of all self-suppression and self-extinction, and all corresponding exalting and magnifying and benefiting of other men.  Whatever other passing uses this present world, so full of trial and temptation and suffering, may have, this surely is the supreme and final use of it—­to be a furnace, a graving-house, a refining place for human character.  Literally all things in this life and in this world—­I challenge you to point out a single exception—­work together for this supreme and only good, the purification, the refining, the testing, and the approval of human character.  Not only so, but we are all in the very heat of the furnace, and under the very graving iron and in the very refining fire that our prefigured and predestinated character needs.  Your life and its trials would not suit the necessities of my moral character, and you would lose your soul beyond redemption if you exchanged lots with me.  You do not put a pearl under the potter’s wheel; you do not cast clay into a refining fire.  Abraham’s character was not like David’s, nor David’s like Christ’s, nor Christ’s like Paul’s.  As Butler says, there is ‘a providential disposition of things’ around every one of us, and it is as exactly suited to the flaws and excrescences, the faults and corruptions of our character as if Providence had had no other life to make a disposition of things for but one, and that one our own.  Have you discovered that in your life, or any measure of that?  Have you acknowledged to God that you have at last discovered the true key of your life?  Have you given Him the satisfaction to know that He is not making His providential dispositions around a stock or a stone, but that He has one under His hand who understands His hand, and responds to it, and rises up to meet and salute it?

And we cease to wonder so much at the care God takes of human character, and the cost He lays out upon it, when we think that it is the only work of His hands that shall last for ever.  It is fit, surely, that the ephemeral should minister to the eternal, and time to eternity, and all else in this world to the only thing in this world that shall endure and survive this world.  All else we possess and pursue