at all times been a perplexity to faith, and when manifested on such a tremendous scale, when it rises before us in the monstrous form of an awful war, the question presses upon our hearts and minds with painful force. But the privilege of the Christian is to maintain through all these distresses the proclamation that the love of God, the goodness of God, the mercy of God, the blessing of God are still at work, notwithstanding the clouds with which they seem obscured. Clouds and darkness may be round about Him, but righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne. The general explanation of this great mystery is that these sufferings are the means by which God asserts the supremacy of righteousness and truth. He has so ordered the world that unrighteousness, ungodliness, untruth, immorality of all kinds inevitably punish themselves by leading to appeals to force, and so provoke the wars and fightings of which St. James speaks in this Epistle. “From whence,” he says, “come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts, that war in your members? Ye lust and have not; ye kill, and desire to have and cannot obtain”--can there be a truer description, in brief, of the origin of the present war? These are God’s judgments, in which He so orders the world that nations and individuals punish themselves for their indulgence in covetous and unbridled passions. They will not submit to be checked by conscience or by reason, and therefore God leaves them to the natural consequences of their mutual lusts and violences. In fact, the miseries of war are a conspicuous instance of the great truth that good things are always coming from God. Vengeance for evil is a good thing; and the punishment, even the bitter punishment, of selfishness, whether in individuals or in national life, the severest punishments of covetousness, arrogance, forgetfulness of God, disobedience to Christ--these punishments are good things; and if God is chastising Europe for such sins, and ourselves in no small measure, He is doing it at once in judgment and in mercy. It is a warning to every nation, and to every man and woman, to consider in what respect they have been failing in their duty to God and to Christ, to their neighbour, and even to themselves, and to pray God to open their eyes and enable them to repent and amend. What we see before us in a convulsion like this, is the outburst of the lightnings and thunders of righteous judgment, and if it brings men to their knees in penitence and amendment of life, it may prove one of God’s greatest blessings to the world.