Patience, brothers, patience! One grand work, the grandest, spreads broad and fair before you; “in your patience possess ye your souls.” The hiring is in higher, wiser hands; the patience, the hope, are in yours, with all their glorious eternal fruit. None of the sighing, none of the groaning, none of the desire and yearning of your spirit, is hidden from Him who made you, and who in His own good time will call you to your God-ordained work. “UNTO THIS LAST WILL I GIVE, EVEN AS UNTO THEE” reveals the sublime equity of His dealings. Await with strong patience, with steadfast hope, the things and the times of His sovereign appointment; till you find with profound and wondering joy, that your patience has won a prize whose splendour outshines the constellations, and whose bliss shall outlast eternity. IV. LAW AND LIFE. “In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.”—ECCLES. xi. 3. There are few passages in the word of God which are more constantly misapplied than this. It is systematically wrested to the establishment of doctrines with which it has nothing whatever to do. The popular interpretation of the text treats it as equivalent to the assertion, that the condition of the human soul through its long eternity is settled absolutely and irrevocably by death. We believe that nine out of ten, of those who hold this doctrine would quote this passage if they were suddenly asked to sustain their belief out of the word of God. With the truth of the doctrine in question we are not dealing in the present discourse; there are passages in the word of God which bear on it with most unquestionable cogency. But this is not one of them. Our present purpose is to show what it _does_ mean, and that its reference is to a subject which is well-nigh as far removed from that on which it is supposed to bear as the poles.