And so, perhaps, you begin to see that suffering used by Almighty God has its uses. It very often is the means, in cases where other means have failed, of weaning a soul away from earth, and fixing its hopes on the things of heaven. It very often is the first warning given to the soul of man, that here has he no continuing city, but must seek one to come. Reader, it may be as you have walked along life’s troubled way, you have as yet had but little taste of suffering. But it will come one day. It comes to us all; and very often, the best men, and the holiest men are the greatest sufferers, under the chastening hand of God. You remember the case of Job in the Bible, what a sufferer he was! And yet Job was a good man; for when the temptation came to him to curse God and die, he recognised it as the voice of Satan, even though the words were spoken by the one nearest to him on earth. The great thing for us all to recognise in the day of suffering and the time of sorrow alike, is the good hand of our God upon us. To understand that there is such a thing as being "perfect through suffering," and that we, even as the Master Himself did, may learn obedience by the things which we suffer. That a smooth existence without sorrow and without suffering may be a life of mental anguish, while a life of sorrow and suffering may be a life of joy, of hope, and of triumph, are doubtless lessons hard to learn; but for all that we must needs learn them. And if we cannot learn this lesson from the lives of those around us, it may be God’s good pleasure to teach it in our own. *DEATH.* "There is a Reaper whose name is Death, And with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that grow between." _Longfellow._ So solemn a subject is that of death, and so near have many of us been brought to it, either in our own homes or in those of others, that we cannot but approach it with a feeling of awe. To the worldly man death can never be a pleasant prospect. At best it means to him the cessation of all hope and of all action. All worldly pleasure is then at an end, and for him there remains no such rest as is the hope and stay of the people of God. Another class there is that looks upon death in another way. These do not really enjoy life here below, still less do they enjoy any hope of life to come. For such persons death is but a leap in the dark; a bridge across the dark valley from the mists of earth into a far more misty future; a passage from the darkness here into the deeper and blacker darkness beyond.