when calamity and failure came, saying with noble resignation--"I have
received good from the hand of the Lord, and shall I not receive evil?
Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."

It is a life like theirs, mixed with danger and uncertainty, which most
calls out faith in God. It is the life of safety and comfort, in which
our wants are all supplied ready to our hand, which calls it out least.
And therefore it is that life in cities, just because it is most safe and
most comfortable, is so often, alas, most ungodly, at least among the
men. Less common, thank God, is this ungodliness among the women. The
nursing of the sick; the cares of a family, often too sorrows, manifold
and bitter, put them continually in mind of human weakness, and of their
own weakness likewise. Yes. It is sorrow, my friends, sorrow and
failure, which forces men to believe that there is One who heareth
prayer, forces them to lift up their eyes to One from whom cometh their
help. Before the terrible realities of danger, death, bereavement,
disappointment, shame, ruin--and most of all before deserved shame,
deserved ruin--all the arguments of the conceited sophist melt away like
the maxims of the comfortable worldling; and the man or woman who was but
too ready a day before to say, "Tush, God will never see, and will never
hear," begins to hope passionately that God does see, that God does hear.
In the hour of darkness; when there is no comfort in man nor help in man,
when he has no place to flee unto, and no man careth for his soul: then
the most awful, the most blessed of all questions is: But is there no one
higher than man to whom I can flee? No one higher than man who cares for
my soul and for the souls of those who are dearer to me than my own soul?
No friend? No helper? No deliverer? No counsellor? Even no judge? No
punisher? No God, even though He be a consuming fire? Am I and my
misery alone together in the universe? Is my misery without any meaning,
and I without hope? If there be no God: then all that is left for me is