one's self out of believing in
the reality of the evils that assail us, or to forbid that we shall feel
their pain and their burden. Many good people fail to get the good of
life's discipline, because they have somehow come to think that it is
wrong to weep when Christ sends sorrows, and wrong to feel, as other men
feel, the grip and bite of the manifold trials of our earthly lives.
'Weep for yourselves,' for the feeling of the sorrow is the precedent
condition to the benefit from the sorrow, and it yields 'the peaceable
fruit of righteousness to them that are exercised thereby.'

But, on the other hand, the black stream is not to bank up the sunny
one, or prevent it from flowing into the heart, ay! and flowing over,
the other. And so the co-existence of the joys that come from above, and
the sorrows that spring from around, and some of them from beneath, is
the very secret of the Christian life.

II. Further, consider the blessed possibility of this paradox.

Can two conflicting emotions live in a man's heart at once? Rather, we
might ask, are there ever emotions in a man's heart that are not hemmed
in by conflicting ones? Is there ever such a thing in the world's
experience as a pure joy, or as a confidence which has no trace of fear
in it? Are there any pictures without shadows? They are only daubs if
they are. Instead of wondering at this co-existence of joy and sorrow,
we must recognise that it is in full accord with all our experience,
which never brings a joy, but, like the old story of the magic palace,
there is one window unlighted, and which never brings a sorrow so black
and over-arching so completely the whole sky, but that somewhere, if the
eye would look for it, there is a bit of blue. The possibility of the
paradox is in accordance with all human experience.

But then, you say, 'my feelings of joy or sorrow are very largely a
matter of temperament, and still more largely a matter of responding to
the facts round about me. And I cannot pump up emotions to order; and if
I could they would be factitious, artificial, insincere, and do me more
harm than good.' Perfectly true. There are a great many ugly names for
manufactured emotions, and none of them a bit too ugly. Peter does not
wish you to try to get up feeling to order. It is the bane of some type
of Christianity that that is done. You cannot thus manufacture emotion.
No; but I will tell you what you can do. You can determine what you will
think abou