through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. For I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One, thy Saviour. Thou hast been precious in my sight, and I have loved thee: therefore will I give men for thee, and peoples for thy life.” Away, then, with discontent and anxiety for the coming year. Or rather, let us be only discontented with ourselves. Let us only be anxious about our own conduct. God cannot change. If anything goes wrong, it will be not because He has left us, but because we have left Him. Is it not written that all things work together for good to those who love God? Then if things do not work together for good in this coming year, it will be because we do not love God. Do not let us say, “I am righteous, but my neighbours are wicked, and therefore I must be miserable;” neither let us lay the blame of our misfortunes on our rulers; let us lay it on ourselves. What was the word of the Lord to the Jews in a like case: “What means this proverb which you take up, saying, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge? It is not so, O house of Israel. The son shall not die for the iniquity of his father, nor the father for the iniquity of the son. The soul that sinneth, it shall die, saith the Lord.” Oh, my friends, take this to heart solemnly, in the year to come. Our troubles, more of them at least than we fancy, are our own fault, and not our neighbours’, or the government’s, or anyone’s else. And those which are not our own fault directly are so in this way, that they are sent as sharp and wholesome lessons to us; and if we were what we ought to be, we should not want those lessons. Do not fancy that that is a sad and doleful thought to begin the new year with. God forbid! It would be doleful and sad indeed if any one of us, in spite of all his right-doing, might be plunged into any hopeless misery, through the fault of other people, over whom he has no control. But thanks be to the Lord, it is not so. We are His children, and He cares for each and every one of us separately. Each and every one of us has to answer for himself alone, face to face with his God, day by day; every man must bear his own burden; and to every one of us who love God, all things will work together for good. It is, and was, and always will be, as Abraham well knew, far from God to punish the righteous with the wicked. The Judge of all the earth will do right. None of us who repents and turns from the sins he sees round him and in him; none of us who prays for the light and guiding of God’s Spirit; none of us who struggles day by day to keep himself unspotted from this evil world, and live as God’s son, without scandal or ill-name in the midst of a sinful and perverse generation; none of us who does that, but God’s blessing will rest on him. What ruins others will only teach and strengthen him; what brings others to