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?