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suffering. Sooner or later, stealing from the shadow, it lays its piercing hand upon our hearts. Had it been otherwise, man would never have required a man of sorrows to suffer as He Buffered ^ho is our ideal. Now when we are called to suffer there is nothing more beautiful than quiet fortitude ; to take it bravely and qnietly and patiently is one of the noblest victories of life. There are few sights more morally inspiring than that of someone who has a cross to carry ; someone of whom we know, perhaps, that every day must be a day of pain; yet we never hear a murmur from him, he is always bright. He is so busy think- ing about others that he never seems to think about himself. We have all known people such as that ; let us thank God that we have known them. There is no sermon so moving in its eloquence as the unuttered sermon of the cheerful sufferer. Among all the thoughts that God has given to make that victory possible to us there is none more powerful than this, " My grace is sufiBcient for thee."
^ A friend of mine not long ago visited one of the hospitals in London. She was greatly touched by the look of happy peace on the face of one of the patients in a ward. A little while after- wards she asked a nurse who was the sorest sufferer in that ward, and the nurse, to her intense surprise, indicated the man she had first noticed. Going up to him, she spoke to him and told him what the nurse had said, and how she admired his courage when night and day in such pain. "Ah, miss," he said, "it is not courage, it is that," and he pointed to his bed-head, and there was a coloured text with this upon it. It was this that upheld him in the night ; it was this that sustained him in the day.^
When thy lone dreams sweet visions see
And loving looks upon thee shine, And loving lips speak joys to thee
That never, never may be thine ; Then press thy hand hard on thy side,
And force down all the swelling pain; Trust me, the wound, however wide,
Shall close at last, and heal again.
Think not of what is from thee kept;
Think, rather, what thou hast received : Thine eyes have smiled, if they have wept;
Thy heart has danced, if it has grieved.
' G. H. Morrison.
300 POWER IN WEAKNESS
Kich comforts yet shall be thine own;
Yea, God Himself shall wipe thine eyes; And still His love alike is shown
In what He gives, and what denies.*
(3) We need it in temptation. — Like suffering, temptation is universal, and like suffering it is infinitely varied. Probably in all the human family no two are ever tempted quite alike. It is true that temptations may be broadly classified, clustered, as it were, around common centres. There is one class that assails the flesh, another that makes its onset on the mind ; yet every tempta- tion is so adapted to the person tempted that perhaps in all the ages that have gone no one was ever tempted just like us. To us there is no argument so strong as this for the existence of the devil. There is such subtlety in our temptations that it is hard to conceive of it without a brain. We are tempted with incom- parable cunning; temptation comes to us all so subtly and so surely that nothing can explain it but intelligence. Temptation is never obtrusive, but it is always there. It is beside us in the crowded street ; it has no objection to the lonely moor ; it follows us to the ofl&ce and home ; it dogs our footsteps when we go to church ; it insists on sharing in our hours of leisure, and kneels beside us when we pray. There is not a relationship so sweet and sacred but temptation chooses it for its assault; there is not an act of sacrifice so pure but temptation meets us in the doing of it. It never despairs of us until we die. So tempted as we are, is there any hope for us at all against that shameless and malevolent intelligence ? Yes. There is hope in unremitting watchfulness ; there is hope in every breath of prayer. But above all there is hope in this: when we are tempted and are on the point of falling, we can lift up our hearts to Christ and hear Him say, " My grace is sufficient for thee." Was He not tempted in all points like as we are, and yet was He not victorious ? Did He not conquer sin, lead it captive, and lay it vanquished at His feet for ever ? And now we are His and He is ours; that victory which He has won is ours. It is at our disposal every hour.
^ When we are made one with Christ, then His power is really made ours for the warfare against sin. When we abide in Him,
> H. S. Sutton.
2 COR. XII. 9 301
we are really and in very deed kept by Him. At no point is there greater need of wise and cautious statement than here, for unguarded and exaggerated language may go very near the claim- ing of actual perfection. We shall see how Mr. Macgregor himself did not always quite escape this danger. Yet we are to understand broadly that such a promise as, for instance, " My grace is sufficient for thee " is not to be thinned down or emptied of its meaning. If we are one with Him, and His life is being manifested in us, then He is able to keep and His grace is sufficient. There is here not the smallest claim to perfection. That is in this life impossible, alike on the negative side of avoiding every transgression, and, still more manifestly, on the positive side of attaining full conformity to the Son of God. But without any thought of what is unattain- able, it is certain that in the daily warfare the issue in innumerable cases would be very different if we could but remember, and act upon the remembrance, that Divine help is ever at hand for all God's children to claim, and that He means us to claim it, and to live in the joy and power which it brings.^