III. Sickness is often a special grace from God, and is a providential answer to the secret desires of our own souls. Not, indeed, the answer we ask, or the answer we expect; rather, indeed, the answer we would gladly avoid: but still an answer. The cardinal want of man is salvation. Who does not know that sickness has often been sanctified to that end? The cardinal want of the Christian is sanctification--preparedness for heaven; and every Christian knows how seriously this is impeded by a crowd of difficulties, real enough, but which we have a propensity to exaggerate; generally, the daily occupations and cares of life--a family to be provided for, a competency to gain, favourable opportunities to be looked for and seized, daily mischances, and the like. Meanwhile we are conscious of our spiritual wants, and there is a painful conflict between the claims which are temporal, and those which are spiritual. How many Christians are living a life of absorption in the world, yet harassed with occasional regrets, fears, desires, connected with better things? To these sickness is a Divine reply. It is as though God said: "Dear child, I know thy difficulty. Thou canst not of thine own determination leave the world; come away now. Leave thy labour, thy anxiety, thy dreams. Shut out from the world's noise, listen to Me, to thy soul, to heaven, to eternity. Not that thou mayest do thy duty less faithfully do I thus check thee, but that thou mayest learn the true subordination of things to one another; not the spiritual to the temporal, but the temporal to the spiritual. That is why I put this affliction upon thee." Oh, verily, blessed is sickness when viewed from the station where we rest and refresh in the fevered journey of life--a truce after battle, a parenthesis in life's tale, into which God puts His own deep-meaning and gentle word. Let us remember this for our brethren's sakes and for our own. IV. Sickness, as a special proof of God's love, is charged with a mission to bring to us some special gifts and graces. It is above all things a means of blessing when we associate with it the idea of discipline, however stern. There is not a single Christian virtue that may not acquire strength on a bed of sickness, and there are not a few Christian virtues which probably must be learnt there, if they are ever to be learnt perfectly at all. Among these note the following: