peculation, it is a personal experience
that hundreds here can testify to, that the Bible, the Sabbath, the
Supper, all became so many means of grace to them after some great
affliction greatly sanctified. The death of a bride, the death of a
wife, the death of a child; some blow from bride or wife or child worse
than death; a lost hope quenched for ever--these, and things like these,
are needful, as it would seem, to be suffered by most men before they
will wholly open their hearts to the grace of God. 'Before I was
afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept Thy word.'

At the same time, good and necessary as all such wintry experiences are,
their good results on us do not last for ever. In too many cases they do
not last long. It is rather a start in grace we take at such seasons
than a steady and deep growth in it. The growth in grace that comes to
us in connection with some sore affliction is apt to be violent and
spasmodic; it comes and it goes with the affliction; it is not slow,
constant, steady, sure, as all true and natural growth is. If one might
say so, an unbroken winter in the soul, a continual inward winter, is
needed to keep up a steady, deep and fruitful growth in grace. Now, is
there anything in the spiritual husbandry of God that can be called such
a winter of the soul? I think there is. The winter of our outward
life--trials, crosses, sickness and death are all the wages of sin; and
it is among these things that grace first strikes its roots. And what is
the continual presence of sin in the soul but the true winter of the
soul, amid which the grace that is planted in an outbreak of winter ever
after strikes deeper root and grows? Once let a man be awakened of God
to his own great sinfulness; and that not to its fruits in outward
sorrow, but to its malignant roots that are twisted round and round and
through and through his heart, and that man has thenceforth such a winter
within him as shall secure to him a lifelong growth in the most inward
grace. Once let a poor wretch awake to the unbroken winter of his own
sinfulness, a sinfulness that is with him when he lies down and when he
rises up, when he is abroad among men and when he is at home with himself
alone: an incessant, increasing, agonising, overwhelming sense of
sin,--and how that most miserable of men will grow in grace, and how he
will drink in all the means of grace! How he will hear the word of grace
preached, mixing it no long