t most, and what you will look at most, and if you settle
that, that will settle what you feel. And so, though it is by a
roundabout way, we can regulate our emotions. A man travelling in a
railway train can choose which side of the carriage he will look out
at, either the one where the sunshine is falling full on the front of
each grass-blade and tree, or the side where it is the shadowed side of
each that is turned to him. If he will look out of the one window, he
will see everything verdant and bright, and if he will look out at the
other, there will be a certain sobriety and dulness over the landscape.
You can settle which window you are going to look out at. If the
one--'in which ye greatly rejoice.' If the other--'ye are in heaviness
through manifold temptations.' You have seen patterns wrought in black
and white, you may focus your eye so as to get white on a black ground,
or black on a white ground, just as you like. You can do that with your
life, and either fix upon the temptations and the heaviness as the main
thing, or you can fix upon the new life, and the new wealth, and the new
hope, and the new security as the main things. If you do the one, down
you will go into the depths of gloom, and if you do the other, up you
will spring into the ethereal heights of sober and Christian gladness.

So then, brethren, this possibility depends on these things, the choice
of our main object of contemplation, and that breaks up into two
thoughts about which I wish to say a word. The reason why so many
Christian people have only religion enough to make them gloomy, or to
weight them with a sense of burdens and unfulfilled aspirations and
broken resolutions, and have not enough to make them glad, is mainly
because they do not think enough about the four things in which they
might 'greatly rejoice.' I believe that most of us would be altogether
different people, as professing Christians, if we honestly tried to keep
the mightiest things uppermost, and to fill heart and mind far more than
we do with the contemplation of these great facts and truths which,
when once they are beheld and cleaved to, are certain to minister
gladness to men's souls. These great truths which you and I say we
believe, and which we profess to live by, will only work their effect
upon us, so long as they are present to our minds and hearts. You can no
more expect Christian verities to keep you from falling, or to
strengthen you in weakness, or to glad