ereafter
seems required in order to vindicate God's love to His children, who
here reap sorrow from their sonship, that the discipline of life
cannot but end in blessedness. That ground of mere compensation is a
low one on which to rest the certainty of future bliss. But the
inheritance is sure to all who here suffer with Christ, because the
one cause--union with the Lord--produces both the present result of
fellowship in His sorrows, and the future result of joy in His joy,
of possession of His possessions. The inheritance is sure because
Christ possesses it now. The inheritance is sure because earth's
sorrows not merely require to be repaid by its peace, but because
they have an evident design to fit us for it, and it would be
destructive to all faith in God's wisdom, and God's knowledge of His
own purposes, not to believe that what He has wrought us for will be
given to us. Trials have no meaning, unless they are means to an end.
The end is the inheritance, and sorrows here, as well as the Spirit's
work here, are the earnest of the inheritance. Measure the greatness
of the glory by what has preceded it. God takes all these years of
life, and all the sore trials and afflictions that belong inevitably
to an earthly career, and works them in, into the blessedness that
_shall_ come. If a fair measure of the greatness of any result of
productive power be the length of time that was taken for getting it
ready, we can dimly conceive what that joy must be for which seventy
years of strife and pain and sorrow are but a momentary preparation;
and what must be the weight of that glory which is the counterpoise
and consequence to the afflictions of this lower world. The further
the pendulum swings on the one side, the further it goes up on the
other. The deeper God plunges the comet into the darkness out yonder,
the closer does it come to the sun at its nearest distance, and the
longer does it stand basking and glowing in the full blaze of the
glory from the central orb. So in _our_ revolution, the measure of
the distance from the farthest point of our darkest earthly sorrow,
_to_ the throne, may help us to the measure of the closeness of the
bright, perfect, perpetual glory above, when we are _on_ the throne:
for if so be that we are sons, we _must_ suffer with Him; if so be
that we suffer, we _must_ be glorified together!

THE REVELATION OF SONS

'For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for
the manif