ned
to as sure a hope of glory as any of us: ay, and may be nearer it,
too, than many of us, as it is expiating its willfulness in more
terrible and direct punishment. There is not a single spasm in that
decayed and nerveless frame, not a single horror of all the gloomy
forebodings and irrational shudderings of the sickening delirium, not
a single mile of the grim dusty roads he wearily traverses, which is
not needed to bring him to the truth. The soul may be so clouded that
it may not even be taking note of its punishment, may not be even
conscious of it, may hardly calculate how low it has fallen and how
wretched and hopeless the remainder of its earthly days are bound to
be; but I assert that it is none of it blind suffering; that not
a pang is unintentionally given, or thrown away; that I shall
hand-in-hand with that soul go some day up the golden stairs that
lead to the Father, and we shall say one to another, 'My brother, you
despised me on earth; you took for a mark of the neglect and
disfavour of God what was only a sign of His constant care; you took
for an indwelling of foul spirits what was only a testimony of my
distance from the truth.'

"And we shall speak together of new things, so marvellous that they
will banish memory for ever.

"Who would have thought that the sight of a drunken tramp in a
hedgerow would have brought one so close to a sight of God's
purposes?

"Yet so it is, my friend. God keeps showing me by the strangest of
surprises that He is all about us. This very incident, so seemingly
trivial, is yet a part of my life already, it has set its mark upon
me. All his life he has been led, from bad to worse, into drink,
and haunted by all the other devils of sin, and piloted across the
country thus, so that the lines of our lives cut at this instant
never to cut again. There are no such things as _chance_ meetings.
There is no smaller or greater in the sight of God. It is as much a
purpose of his life that he should preach this sermon to Edward and
myself to-day, as that he should be shown by God's own strokes what
happiness really is, by the strong contrast of the bitterness of
sin."

The idea of the purpose of God underlying every incident, however
apparently trivial, was much in his thoughts just then.

"We often are taught how momentous every thing and every moment is,
by the charging of some trivial incident with tremendous issues. A
man fires off his gun. He has done so thousands of t