the meaning of the years. Always smarting under the sharp discipline and
missing the merciful design: 'With Him in trouble.' That helps me to
believe in my religion. Trouble is the test of the creeds. A fig for the
orthodoxy that cannot interpret tears! Write vanity upon the religion that
is of no avail in the house of sorrow. When the earthly song falls on
silence we are disposed to call it a pitiable silence. Not so. Let us say a
divinely opportune silence, for when the many voices grow dumb the One
Voice speaks: 'I will be with him in trouble,' and the man who has lost the
everything that is nothing only to find the one thing that is all knows
what that promise means.

_I will deliver him._ What a masterful, availing, victorious presence is
this! How this promise goes out beyond our human ministries of consolation!
How often the most we can do is to walk by our brother's side whilst he
bears a burden we cannot share! How often the earthly sympathy is just a
communion of sad hearts--one weak hand holding another! 'I will deliver
him.' That is not merely sympathy, it is victory. The divine love does not
merely condole, it delivers.

You cannot add anything to this promise. It is complete. The time of the
deliverance is there, the manner of it is there, the whole ministry of help
is there. You say you cannot find anything about time and manner. You can
only find the bare promise of deliverance. My friend, there are no bare
promises in the lips of the Heavenly Father. In the mighty, merciful
leisure of omnipotence, in the perfect fitness of things, in a way wiser
than his thinking and better than his hoping and larger than his prayer, 'I
will deliver him.'

_And honour him._ It will be no scanty, obscure, uncertain deliverance.
There shall be light in it, glory in it. The world battles with its