T[ When man thus considers the wealth and the marvellous sublimity of the Divine nature, and all the manifold gifts which He grants and offers to His creatures, amazement is stirred up in his spirit at the sight of so manifold a wealth and majesty ; at the sight of the immense faithfulness of God to all His creatures. This causes a strange joy of spirit, and a boundless trust in God, and this inward joy surrounds and penetrates all the forces of the souls in the secret places of the spirit.1
Tf A beautiful instance is recorded in the life of Catherine of Siena. The plague was abroad, and Father Matthew, the Director of the Hospital, caught the infection while ministering to a dying person. The next day he was carried like a corpse, livid and strengthless, from the chapel to his room. The physician said that every symptom announced the approach of death. But Catherine loved him sincerely, and when she heard of his illness she went to his room and cried with a cheerful voice, " Get up, Father Matthew ! Get up ! " As she left the house, another friend — Eaymond of Capua — was entering, and said to her, " Will you allow a person so dear to us, and so useful to others, to die ? I know your secrets, and I know that you obtain from God whatsoever you ask in faith." She bowed her head, and, after a few moments, looked him in the face with her countenance radiant with joy, and said, " Well, let us take courage ; he will not die this time." The good Father immediately recovered, and sat down to a light meal with his friends, chatting and laughing gaily with them.
1 M. Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeek and Ou Mystics, 140.
i CORINTHIANS x. 13 285
Catherine believed in the promise, " The prayer of faith shall save the sick." She was bold in appealing to the truthfulness of the Divine Healer, and she was not disappointed. " Know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is God ; the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him" (Deut. vii. 9). We very seldom put the veracity of God to the test. But the more we venture on Him and on His gracious words, the stronger and clearer is our faith bound to become.1
If I sometimes think that in the case of those who are not tried by sharp outward temptations to break God's commandments, the trial may come in inward temptations to distrust His grace. It would be a bad business for us if we were not tried in some way.2
If There are two possible ways of looking upon trial. The first is that God is angry with the sufferer and is taking His revenge. It is a view old as the fears and the morbidness of man. The friends of Job are its champions in every generation. It seems so obvious to those who hold it that few of them give any pains to think it out to its issues, or realize how small a God this of theirs must be. Those who seriously believe in God at all will have little difficulty in passing to the second way of looking upon trial, and if their faith is worthy of the name, it will be quite as obvious as the former. Once seen it can never again be doubted, though it may sometimes require a strong effort to realize and hold by it. When we hear that certain troops have been sent into the most dangerous and trying post on the battlefield, how do we judge of them ? Is it that their general has wished to punish them, or is it not rather that he believed in them best of all? And is not such confidence an honour greater than all other praise ? To look at life under that light is to be done with fears and doubts. And along with that we take the further assurance that God sends no man into any battle that he may fall. None of all His troops are ever sacrificed to the exigencies of the field.3
And this shalt thou know most surely, God breaketh His faith
with none. Teach thy thoughts ne'er from Him to wander, since Himself
and His ways are One."
3. "God is faithful," says St. Paul, and proceeds to point
1 J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 52. 8 The Life of R. W. Bale of Birmingham, 544. • J. Kelman, Honour towards God, 52.
286 TRUST IN GOD AND DO THE RIGHT
out to the Corinthians the ways in which God's faithfulness is shown towards them in the matter of their temptations. He tells them (1) that God permits the temptation, suffers them to be tempted ; (2) that He proportions the temptation to their strength of resistance, not suffering them to be tempted above that they are able; (3) that He provides the way of escape from every temptation. So we have
I. The Control of Temptation. II. The Adjustment of Temptation. III. The Escape from Temptation.
The Control of Temptation.
The term " proof," " temptation," comprehends all that puts moral fidelity to the proof, whether this proof has for its end to manifest and strengthen the fidelity — it is in this sense that God can tempt, — or whether it seeks to make man fall into sin — it is in this sense that God cannot tempt, and that the devil always tempts. It may also happen that the same fact falls at once into these two categories, as, for example, the temptation of Job, which on the part of Satan had for its end to make him fall, and which God, on the contrary, permitted with the view of bringing out into clear manifestation the fidelity of His servant, and of raising him to a higher degree of holiness and of knowledge. There are even cases in which God permits Satan to tempt, not without consenting to his attaining his end of bringing into sin. So in the case of David. This is when the pride of man has reached a point such that it is a greater obstacle to salvation than the commission of a sin ; God then makes use of a fall to break this proud heart by the humbling experience of its weakness.1