o; with many--and those, perhaps,
the best people--it goes on month after month, year after year: by
secret trials, chastenings which none but they and God can
understand, the Lord is cleansing them from their secret faults, and
making them to understand wisdom secretly; burning out of them the
chaff of self-will and self-conceit and vanity, and leaving only the
pure gold of his righteousness. How many sweet and holy souls look
cheerful enough before the eyes of man, because they are too humble
and too considerate to intrude their secret sorrows upon the world.
And yet they have their secret sorrows. They carry their cross
unseen all day long, and lie down to sleep on it at night: and they
will carry it for years and years, and to their graves, and to the
Throne of Christ, before they lay it down: and none but they and
Christ will ever know what it was; what was the secret chastisement
which he sent to make that soul better, which seemed to us to be
already too good for earth. So does the Lord watch his people, and
tries them with fire, as the refiner of silver sits by his furnace,
watching the melted metal, till he knows that it is purged from all
its dross, by seeing the image of his own face reflected in it. God
grant that our afflictions may so cleanse our hearts, that at the
last Christ may behold himself in us, and us in himself; that so we
may be fit to be with him where he is, and behold the glory which
his Father gave him before the foundation of the world.

SERMON XIX. ELIJAH

(Tenth Sunday after Trinity.)

1 Kings xxi. 19, 20. And thou shalt speak unto him, saying, Thus
saith the Lord, Hast thou killed, and also taken possession? and
thou shalt speak unto him, saying, Thus saith the Lord, In the place
where dogs licked the blood of Naboth, shall dogs lick thy blood,
even thine. And Ahab said to Elijah, Hast thou found me, O mine
enemy? And he answered, I have found thee: because thou hast sold
thyself to work evil in the sight of the Lord.

Of all the grand personages in the Old Testament, there are few or
none, I think, grander than the prophet Elijah. Consider his
strange and wild life, wandering about in forests and mountains,
suddenly appearing, and suddenly disappearing again, so that no man
knew where to find him; and, as Obadiah said when he met him, 'If I
tell my Lord, Behold, Elijah is here; then, as soon as I am gone
from thee, the Spirit of the Lord shall carry thee whithe