Christ, which shields us from
them all.

Now it must be noticed that here, in his triumphant question, the
Apostle means not our love to Christ but His to us; and not even our
sense of that love, but the fact itself. And his question is just
this:--Is there any evil in the world that can make Christ stop
loving a man that cleaves to Him? And, as I said, to ask the question
is to answer it. The two things belong to two different regions. They
have nothing in common. The one moves amongst the low levels of
earth; the other dwells up amidst the abysses of eternity, and to
suppose that anything that assails and afflicts us here has any
effect in making that great heart cease to love us is to fancy that
the mists can quench the sunlight, is to suppose that that which lies
down low in the earth can rise to poison and to darken the heavens.

There is no need, in order to rise to the full height of the
Christian contempt for calamity, to deny any of its terrible power.
These things can separate us from much. They can separate us from
joy, from hope, from almost all that makes life desirable. They can
strip us to the very quick, but the quick they cannot touch. The
frost comes and kills the flowers, browns the leaves, cuts off the
stems, binds the sweet music of the flowing rivers in silent chains,
casts mists and darkness over the face of the solitary grey world,
but it does not touch the life that is in the root.

And so all these outward sorrows that have power over the whole of
the outward life, and can slay joy and all but stifle hope, and can
ban men into irrevocable darkness and unalleviated solitude, they do
not touch in the smallest degree the secret bond that binds the heart
to Jesus, nor in any measure affect the flow of His love to us.
Therefore we may front them and smile at them and say:

'Do as thou wilt, devouring time,
With this wide world, and all its fading sweets';

'my flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart,
and my portion for ever.'

You need not be very much afraid of anything being taken from you as
long as Christ is left you. You will not be altogether hopeless so
long as Christ, who is our hope, still speaks His faithful promises
to you, nor will the world be lonely and dark to them who feel that
they are lapt in the sweet and all-pervading consciousness of the
changeless love of the heart of Christ. 'Shall tribulation, or
distress, or persecution?'--in any of these