ipline, bent as
he is on some great or good work, is impelled by it only to a change
of method,--never to a change of purpose; and the disappointment
effectually serves the purpose. But the fact before us is most clearly
seen when we contemplate the results of disappointment upon a religious
and un-religious spirit. A man is not made better by disappointment to
whom this world is virtually everything;--to whom spiritual things are
not realities. To him life is a narrow stream between jutting crags, and
its substance flows away with the objects before his eyes. Nay, some men
of this sort are made worse by the failure of earthly hopes, and their
natures are compressed and hammered by misfortune into a sullen and
granitic defiance. But he who sees beyond these material limits, looking
to the great end and final relations of our being, always extracts from
mortal disappointment a better result. In the wreck of external things
he gathers that spiritual good which is the substance of all life;--that
faith, and patience, and holy love, which, when all that is mortal
and incidental in our humanity passes away, constitute the residuum of
personality.

Our hopes disappointed,--our plans thwarted and overthrown; but out
of that disappointment a richer good evolving than we had conceived;
something that tends more than all our effort to produce the real object
of life. My friends, what do we make out of this fact? Why, surely this,
that life is not our plan, but God's. Consider what we, often, would
have made out of life, and compare this with what Providence has made
out of it. Contrast the man's achievement with the boy's scheme;
the dream of care with the moral glory that has sprung from toil
and trouble. Contrast the idea of the Saviour in the minds of those
disciples with the actual Saviour rising victorious from the conditions
of shame and death.

Life is God's plan; not ours. We may find this out only by effort; but
we do find it out.

We are responsible for the use of our materials, but the materials
themselves, and the great movement of things, are furnished for us.
Let us fall into no ascetic view of life. Out of our joy and our
acknowledged good the Supreme Disposer works his spiritual ends. But,
especially, how often does he do this out of our trials, and sorrows,
and so-called evils! Once more I say life is God's plan; not ours.
For often on the ruins of visionary hope rises the kingdom of our
substantial possessio