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bsent brother--how his return is looked and longed for! The "Elder Brother"--the "Living Kinsman"--sends a message to His waiting Church and people--a word of solace, telling that _soon_ ("a little while,") and He will be back again, never again to leave them. There are indeed blessed moments of communion which the believer enjoys with His beloved Lord _now_; but how fitful and transient! To-day, life is a brief Emmaus journey--the soul happy in the presence and love of an unseen Saviour. To-morrow, He is _gone_; and the bereft spirit is led to interrogate itself in plaintive sorrow,--"Where is now thy God?" Even when there is no such experience of darkness and depression, how much there is in the world around to fill the believer with sadness! His Lord rejected and disowned--His love set at nought--His providences slighted--His name blasphemed--His creation groaning and travailing in pain--disunion, too, among His people--His loving heart wounded in the house of His friends! But "yet a little while," and all this mystery of iniquity will be finished. The absent Brother's footfall will soon be heard,--no longer "as a wayfaring man who turneth aside to tarry for a night," but to receive His people into the permanent "mansions" His love has been preparing, and from which they shall go no more out. Oh, blessed day! when creation will put on her Easter robes--when her Lord, so long dishonoured, will be enthroned amid the hosannahs of a rejoicing universe--angels lauding Him--saints crowning Him--sin, the dark plague-spot on His universe, extinguished for ever--death swallowed up in eternal victory! And it is but "a little while!" "Yet a little while," we elsewhere read, "and He that shall come, will come, and will not tarry" (literally, "a little while as may be.") "He will stay not a moment longer," says Goodwin, "than He hath despatched all our business in Heaven for us." With what joy will He send His mission-Angel with the announcement, "the little while is at an end;" and to issue the invitation to the great festival of glory, "Come! for all things are ready!" Child of sorrow! think often of this "_little while_." "The days of thy mourning will soon be ended." There is a limit set to thy suffering time,--"After that ye have suffered a WHILE." Every wave is numbered between you and the haven; and then when that haven is reached, oh, what an apocalypse of glory!--the "little while" of time merged into the great a
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