To be sure, complete confidence in the possibility of a release from sorrows through trust in God comes to be a certainty only through experience; but there is, in the Bible and in countless later writings and in many human lives, such a mass of assurances and experiences of trustworthy men, and on the other hand, there are, before our eyes, so many obvious examples of the impossibility of any other release from sorrow, that we may fittingly ask: Why is there so great an aversion to making this experience? Why, when men are tormented with sorrow, often to the point of despair, why do they not at least make trial of this, instead of seeking death? The reason, perhaps, is mostly this: they do not want to be dependent on God; they had much rather put dependence on pitiless men. Indeed, the assurances of the Bible may be appropriated in their literal, full meaning only by the man who has sought no alien help beside, nor any human help at all before he has first sought God’s. But how many are there to-day who do that? So long as the sun of fortune shines for them, they believe in their “lucky star” with a kind of ludicrous or sacrilegious fatalism, and therewith a secret fear often takes them unawares; for “happiness of this kind needs many supports, while the happiness of those at one with the will of God has need of but one.” But when once they have misfortune and no human aid to ward it off, they go all to pieces and fall into the manifold “nervous affections” of our time, into sleeplessness and ceaseless unrest, and these bring them to the numberless sanitariums, for the most part vainly; for “the sorrow of the world worketh death,” and against that no nerve specialist nor hydropathy avails. It is certain that there is a way of release from continuous sorrow; it must be just as certain that single and even frequent sorrows belong to the necessary events of our life. There can be no human life without sorrows; but to live with sorrows, yes, with many sorrows, yet free from sorrow’s burden, that is the art of life toward which we are being trained. It is, therefore, an everyday experience that men who have too few sorrows buy themselves some; for riches, which in the view of most men are meant to release one from anxiety, are not fitted to do that; they are “deceitfulness,” as Christ himself calls them, and his warnings against them, which we are wont to take so lightly, are surely not there for merely “decorative effect.”