ho lived and wrote in a
scorching climate, draws his figure from what he had seen and felt when he
represents God as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

Many people have found this world a desert-march. They go half consumed of
trouble all their days. But glory be to God! we are not turned out on a
desert to die. Here is the long, cool, certain, refreshing shadow of the
Lord.

A tree, when in full leafage, drops a great deal of refreshment; but in a
little while the sun strikes through, and you keep shifting your position,
until, after a while, the sun is set at such a point that you have no shade
at all. But go in the heart of some great rock, such as you see in Yosemite
or the Alps, and there is everlasting shadow. There has been thick shade
there for six thousand years, and will be for the next six thousand. So our
divine Rock, once covering us, always covers us. The same yesterday, to-day
and for ever! always good, always kind, always sympathetic! You often hold
a sunshade over your head passing along the road or a street; but after a
while your arm gets tired, and the very effort to create the shadow makes
you weary. But the rock in the mountains, with fingers of everlasting
stone, holds its own shadow. So God's sympathy needs no holding up from us.
Though we are too weak from sickness or trouble to do anything but lie
down, over us He stretches the shadow of His benediction.

It is our misfortune that we mistake God's shadow for the night. If a man
come and stand between you and the sun, his shadow falls upon you. So God
sometimes comes and stands between us and worldly successes, and His shadow
falls upon us, and we wrongly think that it is night. As a father in a
garden stoops down to kiss his child the shadow of his body falls upon it;
and so many of the dark misfortunes of our life are not God going away from
us, but our heavenly Father stooping down to give us the kiss of His
infinite and everlasting love. It is the shadow of a sheltering Rock, and
not of a devouring lion.

Instead of standing right out in the blistering noon-day sun of earthly
trial and trouble, come under the Rock. You may drive into it the longest
caravan of disasters. Room for the suffering, heated, sunstruck, dying, of
all generations, in the shadow of the great Rock:

"Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee."

CHAPTER XLI.

HIDING EGGS FOR EASTER.

Those who were so unfortunate as to have be