great deal easier to do that which is
wrong than that which is right, our nature being corrupt and depraved.

Blessed be God, we have a directory! As a man lost on the mountains takes
out his map and sees the right road marked down, and makes up his mind what
to do, so the Lord, in His gospel map, has said: "This is the way, walk ye
in it." Blessed be God for His guiding mercy!

Think also of the comforting mercy of God. In the days when men lived five
or six or seven hundred years, I suppose that troubles and misfortunes came
to them at very great intervals. Life did not go so fast. There were not so
many vicissitudes; there was not so much jostling. I suppose that now a
man in forty years will have as many vexations and annoyances and hardships
and trials and temptations as those antediluvians had in four hundred
years.

No one escapes. If you are not wounded in this side, you must be wounded in
that. There are foes all around about you. There is no one who has come up
to this moment without having been cleft of misfortunes, without having
been disappointed and vexed and outraged and trampled on.

The world comes and tries to solace us, but I think the most impotent thing
on earth is human comfort when there is no gospel mixed with it. It is a
sham and an insult to a wounded spirit--all the comfort that this world can
offer a man; but in his time of darkness and perplexity and bereavement and
persecution and affliction, Christ comes to him with the solace of His
Spirit, and He says: "Oh, thou tempted one, thou shalt not be tempted above
that thou art able." He tells the invalid, "There is a land where the
inhabitants never say, 'I am sick.'" He says to the assaulted one, "You are
no better than I am; they maltreated me, and the servant ought not to
expect to have it easier than his Lord."

He comes to the bereaved one and says: "I am the resurrection and the life;
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." And if
the trouble be intricate, if there be so many prongs to it, so many horns
to it, so many hoofs to it, that he cannot take any of the other promises
and comforts of God's word to his soul, he can take that other promise made
for a man in the last emergency and when everything else fails: "All things
work together for good to those that love God." Oh, have you never sung of
the comforting mercy of God?

Think also of His enthroning mercy. Notwithstanding there are so many
comforts i