If it be true that God our Father is working in advance of us all the time, then surely it is wrong to speak of the monotony of life? For we are on a road which God Himself has sown with surprises for us, and the hour of our deadliest weariness may be the immediate percursor of our richest and most joyous find. Who could have supposed, at the end of the eighteenth century, when poetry in England seemed dead, that a great galaxy of stars--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats--was on the very eve of rising? The unexpected can always happen. You may come upon another of God’s hidden blessings to-morrow. Let us not talk of monotony, therefore, in an age which has seen so many wonderful things happen. Rather let us hold to the faith that all the while God is going before us with the blessings of goodness. This faith puts another complexion on all our fears and forebodings. Before we live it, the web of our life passes through God’s hands. And the shaded parts, as well as the bright parts, are in His wise and loving design. Nobody can promise us freedom from sorrow, but the Bible promises that God is beforehand to make the sorrow bearable. He has adjusted our temptations to our strength, and never a one has He hidden, where we come upon it, that it is impossible for us by His help to withstand. Before the mother puts her little child into his hot bath at night, she tests the water first with her fingers. And the Psalmist means us to believe that life comes to us from God, who has measured and adapted it for us, beforehand, in a like fashion. Viewed in the light of this faith, Death itself takes on a different aspect. Oliver Wendell Holmes has suggested that the story of this life and the next can be fully written in two strokes of the pen, an interrogation-point, and, above it, a mark of exclamation--fear and question here below, and, above, adoration, wonder, surprise. "I go to prepare a place for you," said Christ to His disciples. If the preparation for us here is so wonderful, is it likely to fail yonder? If Love made ready for us here, shall it not be beforehand there too? Yea, verily. Our experience of how God prevents us here with His loving kindness ought to strengthen in us all the "faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the saint’s trust in every age, that when we pass hence it will be to meet the grandest, the most blessed, and the most surprising provision of all." PRAYER Our Father in Heaven, we shall not be afraid of what life may hold for us when we have learned that our little web has first passed through Thy merciful and loving hands. We have often prayed that Thou wouldest go with us; but Thou hast answered us beyond our asking, for Thou goest before us all. In the faith of that leading, make us to journey bravely and to sleep secure. Amen. "_Fight the good fight of faith._" (1 TIMOTHY vi. 12.) XVII