earth's sorrow. One look _from_ Christ will fill our hearts with
sunshine. All tears are dried on eyes that meet His. Loving hearts
find their heaven in looking into one another's faces, and if Christ
be our love, our deepest and purest joys will be found in His glance
and our answering gaze.

If one could anyhow take a bit of the Arctic world and float it down
into the tropics, the ice would all melt, and the white dreariness
would disappear, and a new splendour of colour and of light would
clothe the ground, and an unwonted vegetation would spring up where
barrenness had been. And if you and I will only float our lives
southward beneath the direct vertical rays of that great 'Sun of
Righteousness,' then all the dreary winter and ice of our sorrows
will melt, and joy will spring. Brother! the Christian life is a glad
life, because Christ, the infinite and incarnate Lover of our souls,
looks upon the heart that loves and trusts Him.

III. Still further, note how our Lord here sets forth His disciples'
joy as beyond the reach of violence and independent of externals.

'No man taketh it from you.' Of course, that refers primarily to the
opposition and actual hostility of the persecuting world, which that
handful of frightened men were very soon to face; and our Lord
assures them here that, whatsoever the power of the devil working
through the world may be able to filch away from them, it cannot
filch away the joy that He gives. But we may extend the meaning
beyond that reference.

Much of our joy, of course, depends upon our fellows, and disappears
when they fade away from our sight and we struggle along in a