It is needful, I say, to bear this in mind just now. People are, as I told you, too apt to say that the Old Testament saints got their rewards in this life, while we shall get them in the next. Do they find that in Scripture? If they will read their Bible they will find that the Old Testament saints were men whom God was training and educating, as He does us, by experience and by suffering. That David, so far from having his reward at once in this life, had his bitter sorrows and trials; that Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Job, all, indeed, of the old prophets, had to be made perfect by suffering, and (as St. Paul says) died in faith NOT having received the promises. So that if they had their reward in this life, it must have been a spiritual reward, the reward of a good conscience, and of the favour of Almighty God. And that is no transitory or passing reward, but enduring as immortality itself. But people do not usually care for that spiritual reward. Their notion of reward and happiness is that they are to have all sorts of pleasures, they know not what, and know not really why. And because they cannot get pleasant things enough to satisfy them in this life, they look forward greedily to getting them in the next life; and meanwhile are discontented with God's Providence, and talk of God's good world as if some fiend and not the Lord Jesus Christ was the maker and ruler thereof. Do not misunderstand me. I am no optimist. I know well that things happen in this world which must, which ought to make us sad--so sad that at moments we envy the dead, who are gone home to their rest; real tragedies, real griefs, divine and Christlike griefs, which only loving hearts know--the suffering of those we love, the loss of those we love, and, last and worst, the sin of those we love. Ah! if any of those swords have pierced the heart of any soul here, shall I blame that man, that woman, if they cry at times, "Father, take me home, this earth is no place for me." Shall I bid them do aught but cling to the feet of Christ and cry, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt." Oh, not of such do I speak; not of such sharers of Christ's unselfish suffering here, that they may be sharers of His unselfish joy hereafter. Not of them do I speak; but of those who only wish to make up for selfish discomforts and disappointments in this life by selfish comforts and satisfaction in the next; and who therefore take up (let me use the honest English word) some maundering form of religion, which, to judge from their own conduct, they usually only half believe; those who seem, on six days of the week, as fond of finery and frivolity as any other gay worldlings, and on the seventh join eagerly in hymns in which (in one case at least) they inform the Almighty God of truth, who will not be mocked, that they lie awake at night, weeping because they cannot die and see "Jerusalem the golden," and so forth. Or those,