also. _National Sermons_. To escape atheism and despair, let us remember that the Creator and Ordainer of the circumstances of life is not chance or Nature, but the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and of us. When you feel you are in the deepest and gloomiest doubt, pray the prayer of desperation; cry out, "Lord, if Thou dost exist, let me know that Thou dost exist! Guide my mind by a way that I know not into Thy truth," and God will deliver you. _Letters and Memories_. Sad as your letter was, it gave me pleasure; for it is always a pleasure to see life springing out of death, health returning after disease, though, as doctors know, the recovery from asphyxia or drowning is always as painful as the temporary death itself was painless. Faith is born of doubt. "It is not life, but death, where nothing stirs." Take all these doubts and struggles of yours as simply so many signs that your Father in heaven is treating you as a father, that He has not forsaken you, is not offended with you, but is teaching you in the way best suited to your own idiosyncracy, the great lesson of lessons, "Empty thyself and God will fill thee." Take your sorrows to your Father in heaven. If that name Father mean anything, it must mean that He will not turn away from His wandering child in a way that you would he ashamed to turn away from yours. If there be pity, lasting affection, patience in man, they must have come from God. They above all things must be His likeness. Believe that He possesses them a million times more fully than any human being. St. Paul knew well at least the state of mind in which you are. He said that he had found a panacea for it. And his words, to judge from the way in which they have taken root and spread and conquered, must have some depth and life in them. Why not try them? Just read the first nine chapters of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, taking for granted that they mean the simplest and most obvious sense which can be put upon them. _Letters and Memories_. When the hour of temptation comes, go back, go back if you would escape, to what you were taught at your mother's knee concerning the grace of God; for that alone will keep you safe, or angel, or archangel, or any created being safe, in this life, and in all lives to come. _Sermons on David_.