depends altogether on the angle at which you look at your life what
you see in it. For instance, you know how children do when they get a
bit of a willow wand into their possession. They cut off rings of
bark, and get the switch alternately white and black, white and black,
and so on right away to the tip. Whether will you look at the white
rings or the black ones? They are both there. But if you rightly look
at the black you will find out that there is white below it, and it
only needs a very little stripping off of a film to make it into white
too. Or, to put it into simpler words, no Christian man has the right
to regard anything that God's Providence brings to him as such
unmingled evil that it ought to make him sad. We are bound to 'rejoice
in the Lord always.'

I know how hard it is, but sure am I that it is possible for a man, if
he keeps near Jesus Christ, to reproduce Paul's paradox of being
'sorrowful yet always rejoicing,' and even in the midst of darkness
and losses and sorrows and blighted hopes and disappointed aims to
rejoice in the Lord, and to 'keep the feast with gladness, because the
Lord has made him joyful.' Nor do we discharge our duty, unless side
by side with the sorrow which is legitimate, which is blessed,
strengthening, purifying, calming, moderating, there is also 'joy
unspeakable and full of glory.'

Again, be sure that you limit your delights to God-made joys. Too many
of us have what parts of our nature recognise as satisfaction, and are
glad to have, apart from Him. There is nothing sadder than the joys
that come into a life, and do not come from God. Oh! let us see to it
that we do not fill our cisterns with poisonous sewage when God is
waiting to fill them with the pure 'river of the water of life.' Do
not let us draw our blessedness from the world and its evils. Does my