e blessed Christ and
perhaps of a closest human brother, and must wear smiles before men and
go on with life's work as if all were gladness within the heart. If we
knew the inner life of many of the people we meet, we would be very
gentle with them and would excuse the things in them that seem strange
or eccentric to us. They are carrying burdens of secret grief. We do
not begin to know the sorrows of our brothers.

There is no need to try to solve that old, yet always new, question of
human hearts, "Why does God permit so much suffering in his children?"
It is idle to ask this question, and all efforts at answering it are
not only vain, but they are even irreverent. We may be sure, however,
of one thing, that in every pain and trial there is a blessing folded.
We may miss it, but it is there, and the loss is ours if we do not get
it. Every night of sorrow carries in its dark bosom its own lamps of
comfort. The darkness of grief and trial is full of benedictions.

"The dark hath many dear avails;
The dark distils divinest dews;
The dark is rich with nightingales,
With dreams, and with the heavenly muse.

"Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill,
Complain thou not, my heart, for these
Bank in the current of the will."

The most blessed lives in the world are those that have borne the
burden of suffering. "Where, think you," asks James Martineau, "does
the Heavenly Father hear the tones of deepest love, and see on the
uplifted face the light of most heartfelt gratitude? Not where his
gifts are most profuse, but where they are most meagre; not within the
halls of successful ambition, or even in the dwellings of unbroken
domestic peace; but where the outcast, flying from persecution, kneels
in the evening on the rocks whereon he sleeps; at the fresh grave,
where, as the earth is opened, heaven in answer opens too; by the
pillow of the wasted sufferer, where the sunken eye, denied sleep,
converses with the silent stars, and the hollow voice enumerates in low
prayer the scanty list of comforts, the easily remembered blessings,
and the shortened tale of hopes. Genial, almost to a miracle, is the
soil of sorrow, wherein the smallest seed of love, timely falling,
becometh a tree, in whose foliage the birds of blessed song lodge and
sing unceasingly."

The truly happiest, sweetest, tenderest homes are not those where there
has been no sorrow, but those which have been overshadowed with grief,
a