It is a wonderful thing how often God puts his lighted candles in the cellar. We would have supposed that He would have placed a man like John on a pedestal or a throne, that his influence might reach as far as possible. Instead of that He allowed him to spend the precious months of his brief life in prison. And the lamp flickered somewhat in the pestilential damp. It may be that this is your place also. In the silence of a sick chamber, in the obscurity of some country parish, amid obloquy and hatred, you are doomed to spend your slowly-moving years. It seems such a waste. Loneliness and depression are hard to endure; but the consciousness of accomplishing so little, though at such cost, is very painful. This is your cellar-life, your dungeon experience. Remember that Joseph and Rutherford, John Bunyan and Madame Guyon, have been there before you. Probably, because the cellar is so very dark, God wants to station a candle there, and has placed you there because you can accomplish a work for Him, and for others, of priceless importance. Where is the light needed so much as on a dark landing or a sunken reef? Go on shining, and you will find some day that God will make that cellar a pedestal out of which your light shall stream over the world; for it was out of his prison cell that John illuminated the age in which his lot was cast, quite as much as from his rock-pulpit beside the Jordan. "I would have you know, brethren," said the apostle, "that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the progress of the Gospel, so that my bonds became manifest in Christ throughout the Praetorian guard" (Phil. i. 12, 13, R.V.). III. CHRIST'S WARNING AGAINST THE MISUSE OF OPPORTUNITIES.--"Ye were willing for a season to rejoice in his light." The Greek word rendered _rejoice_ has in it the idea of moths playing around a candle, or of children dancing around a torch-light, as it burns lower and lower. It is as though a light were given to men for an hour, for them to use for some high and sacred purpose, but they employ it for dancing and card-playing, instead of girding up their loins to serious tasks. "You were willing," says the Master, in effect, "to rejoice, to dance and sing, in his light. You treated his ministry as a pastime. As long as he spoke to you about the coming Kingdom, you listened and were glad; but when he began to call you to repentance and warn you of wrath to come, you left him." He is now like an almost extinguished lamp. His hour is all but done. The brief space he was sent to occupy has been fulfilled. "Behold, the night cometh, when no man can work."