for this great loss of his, he will propitiate God’s good-will the more, and reap not double riches, as Job did, but the hundred-fold in eternal life. If he _does_ suffer here, the very fact of his bearing it all bravely will increase his reward. God, in calling him to greater trials and struggles, allowed him to fall from abundance into poverty. Has fire perchance often broken out in your house and destroyed your substance? Remember what happened to Job, give thanks to the Lord, Who was able to stop it and did not stop it, and you will receive a reward as great as if you had poured forth all those things into the hands of the poor. Or, are you living in poverty and hunger, and a thousand dangers? Call to mind Lazarus, who was hard pressed by sickness, and poverty, and solitude, and numberless things of the kind, and all this after so much goodness; call to mind the Apostles, who passed their lives in hunger and thirst and nakedness; and the prophets, and patriarchs, and just, and you will find them one and all, not amongst the rich, not amongst those who feast, but amongst those suffering hunger and affliction and anguish. Pondering on these things, give thanks to God for the share He has allotted to you, not in hatred, but in tender love, since He would not have allowed those men to suffer evils so great, if He had not loved them dearly, because He made them more illustrious through these evils. No good is so great as thanksgiving, as nothing is worse than blasphemy. Let us not be astonished that, when we are paying much attention to spiritual things, we suffer a great deal. It is as with thieves, who do not break into places where mud and chaff and reeds are, but where gold and silver are, and are ever on the watch. Thus the devil gives his special attention to those who are taken up with spiritual things. Snares are numerous where goodness exists, and envy is to be found where there is alms-giving. But we have one great weapon by which we may resist all these machinations, the giving thanks to God in all things. Tell me, did not Abel, who reserved the first-fruits for God, fall by his brother’s hand? Yet God allowed it, not hating the man who had honoured him, but loving him much, and adding to the crown of Abel’s beautiful sacrifice the further crown of martyrdom. Moses wished to succour some one who had been wronged, and he confronted the greatest dangers on this account, and fled from his country, and God allowed it, to teach you what the patience of the saints is. If, knowing beforehand that we should suffer no evil, we were thus to give ourselves up to spiritual things, we should not appear to be doing a great thing, possessing this pledge of security. Now, it so happens that those who do this are chiefly admirable because, foreseeing dangers, and penalties, and deaths, and a thousand evils, they have still neither desisted from their good deeds nor grown faint-hearted through fear of the terrors to come.