In conclusion, only one thing more: we know very well how people, in the hours of their heaviest struggles with sorrow, can lose faith in every ground of consolation and look upon such grounds as unsatisfying, or as the empty talk of people who have themselves suffered nothing like. That may be true, or again it may not. But, in case you think it is, nevertheless try to bear, for the glory of God, what you will and can no longer endure for your own sake or for the sake of those near to you. “When you are driven almost to despair,” says Spurgeon, “and are tempted to lay violent hands upon yourself or to do some other rash and evil deed, do nothing of the kind, but trust yourself to your God; that will bring him more glory than seraphim and cherubim can give. To believe the promise of God, when you are ill, or sad, or near to death--that it is to glorify God.” This “giving God the glory,” or “praising the Lord,” or “hallowing his name,” is one of the many expressions of the Bible which have now quite vanished from our real comprehension and have become an empty phrase. To render glory to God on earth and still to live for him though one would otherwise be glad to dispense with life, that is the highest of all life’s resignations; and he to whom this duty is finally intrusted is not to make complaint, but to be ashamed if it come to one unwilling to accept it. But if it has come to a man who has something of the heroic in his nature, then by its means he will, for the first time, develop the possibilities that lay dormant within him; and the feeling of a larger and surer nearness to God will then, in the bitterest hours of his life, so lift him above himself that these very hours will seem to his after-memory as the most beautiful--as those, indeed, to which he owes all his real happiness in life. Sin and sorrow cling close together in human life; therefore they are also displayed here before the reader as an associated hindrance on the way to happiness. The first step, as a rule, must be to banish sin from life; only then may one seriously think of getting rid of sorrow. For the only true freedom from sorrow lies not in a man’s natural disposition, nor is it the product of happy outward surroundings of any sort; true freedom from sorrow is found in that higher happiness, painfully won, to which Job was led, after his earlier happiness, dependent upon fortuitous things, had been done away. To this happiness, henceforth secure, we all without exception should attain and can attain, just as soon as we have fought through the gates at which the guardians Sin and Sorrow stand. II. “COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE” II. “COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE” Many who are distressed over the manifold evils of our time (but do not themselves have to suffer any too keenly under them) comfort themselves and others in the end with a verse from one of the hymns of Paul Gerhardt: “_The upper hand God holdeth, and maketh all things well._”