at gift makes anything believable, reasonable, possible, rather
than that He should spare not His own Son, and then should
counterwork His own act by sending the world anything but good.

III. And now, lastly, take one or two practical issues
from these thoughts, in reference to our own belief and conduct.

First, I would say, Let us correct our estimates of the relative
importance of the two sets of gifts. On the one side stands the
solitary Christ; on the other side are massed all delights of sense,
all blessings of time, all the things that the vulgar estimation of
men unanimously recognises to be good. These are only makeweights.
They are all lumped together into an 'also.' They are but the golden
dust that may be filed off from the great ingot and solid block. They
are but the outward tokens of His far deeper and true preciousness.
They are secondary; He is the primary. What an inversion of our
notions of good! Do _you_ degrade all the world's wealth,
pleasantness, ease, prosperity, into an 'also?' Are you content to
put it in the secondary place, as a result, if it please Him, of
Christ? Do you live as if you did? Which do you hunger for most?
Which do you labour for hardest? 'Seek ye first the Kingdom and the
King, and all 'these things shall be added unto you.'

Let these thoughts teach us that sorrow too is one of the gifts of
the Christ. The words of my text, at first sight, might seem to be
simply a promise of abundant earthly good. But look what lies close
beside them, and is even part of the same triumphant burst. 'Shall
tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or
peril, or sword?' These are some of the 'all things' which Paul
expected that God would give him and his brethren. And looking upon
all, he says, 'They all work together for good'; and in them all we
may be more than conquerors. It would be a poor, shabby issue of such
a great gift as that of which we have been speaking, if it were only
to be followed by the sweetnesses and prosperity and wealth of this
world. But here is the point that we have to keep hold of--inasmuch
as He gives us all things, let us take all the things that come to us
as being as distinctly the gifts of His love, as is the gift of
Christ Himself. A wise physician, to an ignorant onlooker, might seem
to be acting in contradictory fashions when in the one moment he
slashes into a limb, with a sharp, gleaming knife, and in the next
sedulously binds th