Him, should
fail to send His swift answer.

Ah, brethren! you will never know how deep and ineffably precious are
the consolations which Christ can give, unless you have learned despair
of self, and have come helpless, hopeless, and yet confident, to that
great Lord. Make your hearts empty, and He will fill them; recognise
your desperate condition, and He will lift you up. The deeper down we go
into the depths, the surer is the rebound and the higher the soaring to
the zenith. It is they who have poverty of spirit, and mourning based
upon it, and only they, who pass into the sweetest, sacredest, secretest
recesses of Christ's heart, and there find all-sufficient consolation.

In like manner, that consolation will come in its noblest and most
sufficing form to those who take their outward sorrows and link them
with this sense of their own ill-desert. Oh, dear friends, if I am
speaking to any one who to-day has a burdened heart, let such be sure of
this, that the way to consolation lies through submission; and that the
way to submission lies through recognition of our own sin. If we will
only 'lie still, let Him strike home, and bless the rod,' the rod will
blossom and bear fruit. The water of the cataract would not flash into
rainbow tints against the sunshine, unless it had been dashed into spray
against black rocks. And if we will but say with good old Dr. Watts,

'When His strokes are felt,
His strokes are fewer than our crimes,
And lighter than our guilt,'

it will not be hard to bow down and say, 'Thy will be done,' and with
submission consolation will be ours.

Is there anything to say about that future consolation? Very little, for
we know very little. But 'God Himself shall wipe away all tears from
their eyes.' The hope of that consolation is itself consolation, and
the hope becomes all the more bright when we know and measure the depths
of our own evil. Earth needs to be darkened in order that the magic,
ethereal beauty of the glow in the western heavens may be truly seen.
The sorrow of earth is the background on which the light of heaven is
painted.

So, dear friends, be sure of this, that the one thing which ought to
move a man to sadness is his own character. For all other causes of
grief are instruments for good. And be sure of this, too, that the one
thing which can ensure consolation adequate to the grief is bringing the
grief to the Lord Christ and asking Him to deal with it. His firs