His people.” And in the 14th of Acts we read how God visited the Gentiles, not to punish them, but to take out of them a people for His name, namely, Cornelius and his household. And lastly, St. Peter tells Christian people to glorify God in the day of visitation, as I tell you now—whether His visitation comes in the shape of cholera, or fever, or agricultural distress; or whether it comes in the shape of sanitary reform, and plenty of work, and activity in commerce; whether it seems to you good or evil, glorify God for it. Thank Him for it. Bless Him for it. Whether His visitation brings joy or sorrow, it surely brings a blessing with it. Whether God visits in wrath or in love, still God visits. God shows that He lives; God shows us that He has not forgotten us; God shows us that He is near us. Christ shows us that His words are true: “Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world.” That is a hard lesson to learn and practise, though not a very difficult one to understand. I will try now to make you understand it—God alone can teach you to practise it. I pray and hope, and I believe too, that He will—that these very hard times are meant to teach people _really_ to believe in God and Jesus Christ, and that they _will_ teach people. God knows we need, and thanks be to Him that He _does_ know that we need, to be taught to believe in Him. Nothing shows it to me more plainly than the way we talk about God’s visitations, as if God was usually away from us, and came to us only just now and then—only on extraordinary occasions. People have gross, heathen, fleshly, materialist notions of God’s visitations, as if He was some great earthly king who now and then made a journey about his dominions from place to place, rewarding some and punishing others. God is not in any place, my friends. God is a Spirit. The heaven and the heaven of heavens could not contain Him if He wanted a place to be in, as, glory be to His name, He does not. If He is near us or far from us, it is not that He is near or far from our bodies, as the Queen might be nearer to us in London than in Scotland, which is most people’s notion of God’s nearness. He is near, not our bodies, but our spirits, our souls, our hearts, our thoughts—as it is written, “The kingdom of God is _within_ you.” Do not fancy that when the cholera was in India, God was nearer India than He was to England, and that as the cholera crawled nearer and nearer, God came nearer and nearer too; and that now the cholera is gone away somewhere or other, God is gone away somewhere or other too, to leave us to our own inventions. God forbid a thousand times! As St. Paul says: “He is not far from any one of us.” “In Him we live and move and have our being,” cholera or none. Do you think Christ, the King of the earth, is gone away either—that while things go on rightly, and governments, and clergy, and people do right, Christ is there then, filling them all with His Spirit and guiding them