"A rainbow is made up of rain and sunshine and life is woven of the same stuff--tears and laughter. The most glorious sunshine is incapable of a rainbow without the co-operation of the dark trailing clouds; and it is impossible for the human character to reach its ripest maturity and beauty on joy alone. Sorrow is as beneficent and necessary as joy. There are untutored natives who dread the rainbow. They believe that it is a serpent that rises out of the pools to devour men; and there are unbelieving men in cultured lands who dread adversity no less. They do not believe that _God_ ’brings the cloud.’ The rainbow is their refutation and it is written across the sky for all to see. On the other hand, there are unbelieving men who see only the cloud and are blind to the sunshine. To them life is one long tragedy. It is an immense futility. They regard man as a mere cork in the sea, thrown about by blind, deaf, unintelligible natural forces void of purpose; active indeed but ungoverned. Human life to them is a black cloud driven through immensity by the winds of unintelligent fate. It has no meaning and its darkness is the deeper because they cannot call a halt and disperse it into nothingness. Like Job’s wife they would say ’Curse God and die,’ yet they cannot die. But Job, as he sits on the dunghill, looks up at the rainbow and finds a truer philosophy. ’What?’ says he, ’shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?’ Under the rainbow’s arch there are fruitful fields and beautiful gardens for where the rainbow hangs in air there is sunshine and there is rain--the parents of fruitfulness. And to whom God gives in equal measure joy and sorrow there is beauty and fruitfulness of heart and life. His promise to ’every living creature’ is that He will never send the cloud without the sunshine and, what is not less gracious, He will never send the sunshine without the cloud. When by day the Israelites tramped the fiery desert He led them by a pillar of cloud, and they marched in its shade; and in the blackness of night He threw in the sky a pillar of sunshine; and they walked through the gloom in its light. "In these terrible days of war when our hearts begin to fail us and dark doubts cloud the mind, let us look at the Covenant God has made with us. He has set it in rainbow colors across the sky, that ’he who runs may read’ and ’the wayfaring man though a fool may not err.’ God has flung his rainbow over the trench and the grave; over the Garden of Gethsemane; over the Cross on Calvary. It is over the tomb in the Arimathean’s Garden; and over Olivet, as Christ ascends to heaven. We are born under the rainbow, live under it, die under it. At the last we shall find it over the throne of Judgment. Water and blood flowed from Christ’s side; and life and death, joy and pain, light and darkness, summer and winter, peace and war come forth from God.