There is no evading the conclusion, therefore, that the days of man in this world are few and full of miseries. “The life of man upon earth is a warfare, and his days are like the days of a hireling. He cometh forth like a flower, and is destroyed, and fleeth as a shadow.”(53) “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of grass. The grass is withered, and the flower thereof is fallen away.”(54) To the natural man all this is appalling, and how frequently it finds its solution in unbridled self-indulgence, in mental unbalance, and self-destruction! But the saints, and all the truly wise, have viewed the problem of human suffering in a vastly different light. They have discerned it, first of all, as really distinctive of the road to Heaven, and as essentially pertaining to the royal way of the cross. They have understood that it extinguishes the wrath of the heavenly Father, that it atones for sin and makes the soul conformable to our suffering Saviour, and therefore have they loved it. And more than this, those who have been led by the wisdom of God have found, not only that the crosses of life are essentially connected with the way of salvation, but that by them and through them alone we are often _positively driven_ to God. We may try to avoid them, and at times, perhaps, succeed; we may flee from them or endeavor to still the voice of their pain; or, when unable to escape them, we may, in our wrath and desperation, rise up against them and rebuke them: but they persistently remain, they continue to haunt, as if to woo and to win us to penetrate their deeper meaning, and discover the treasure that in them lies concealed. The very breakdown of human things, the severing of human ties and relationships, the loss of health and wealth, of treasures and friends, and of all that life holds dear, are really meant, in the deepest sense, to drive us to the divine. This is the meaning of those tears and sorrows, those pains and sufferings, that loneliness, that grief, that agony of heart and soul which belong to this world of tears. All these are intended to teach us that here below, on this crumbling shore of time, we have no abiding city, or home, or life, or love; but seek a city, a home, a life, a love that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.(55)