in the teeth of all experience--'A _man_ shall be a refuge'; and the
solution of the riddle in the man Christ Jesus.

I. First, there underlies this prophecy a very sad but a very true
conception of human life.

The three classes of promises have correlative with them three phases of
man's condition, three diverse aspects of his need and misery. The
'covert' and the 'hiding-place' imply tempest, storm, and danger; the
'river of water' implies drought and thirst; 'the shadow of a great
rock' implies lassitude and languor, fatigue and weariness. The view of
life that arises from the combination of these three bears upon its
front the signature of truth in the very fact that it is a sad view.

For, I suppose, notwithstanding all that we may say concerning the
beauty and the blessedness scattered broadcast round about us;
notwithstanding that we believe, and hold as for our lives the happy
'faith that all which we behold is full of blessing,' it needs but a
very short experience of this life, and but a superficial examination of
our own histories and our own hearts, in order to come to the conclusion
that the world is full of strange and terrible sadness, that every life
has dark tracts and long stretches of sombre tint, and that no
representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light and
flings no shadows on the canvas. There is no depth in a Chinese picture,
because there is no shade. It is the wrinkles and marks of tear and wear
that make the expression in a _man's_ portrait. 'Life's sternest painter
"is" its best.' The gloomy thoughts which are charged against Scripture
are the true thoughts about man and the world as man has made it. Not,
indeed, that life needs to be so, but that by reason of our own evil and
departure from God there have come in as a disturbing element the