"When a panorama is to pass before an audience, the artist darkens the room in which they sit, so that the picture may be more fully seen. So God sometimes darkens our place on earth, puts out this light and that, and then before our souls He makes to pass the splendors and glories of the better land."
All Things Work for Good
There is one passage of Scripture which has always been a great comfort to me. In the eighth chapter of Romans Paul says: "All things work together for good to them that love God." Some years ago a child of mine had scarlet fever. I went to the druggist's to get the medicine, which the doctor had ordered, and told him to be sure and be very careful in making up the prescription. The druggist took down one bottle after another, in any one of which there might be what would be rank poison for my child; but he stirred them together and mixed them up, and made just the medicine which my child needed. And so God gives us a little adversity here, a little prosperity there, and all works for our good.
It Takes Time
Suppose I should send my little boy, five years old, to school to-morrow morning, and when he came home in the afternoon, say to him:
"Willie, can you read? can you write? can you spell? Do you understand all about algebra, geometry, Hebrew, Latin and Greek?"
"Why, papa," the little fellow would say, "how funny you talk. I have been all day trying to learn the A, B, C's!"
Suppose I should reply: "If you have not finished your education, you need not go any more." What would you say? Why, you would say I had gone mad!
There would be just as much reason in that as in the way that people talk about the Bible. The men who have studied the Bible for fifty years have never got down to the depths of it yet. There are truths there that the church of God has been searching out for the last nineteen hundred years, but no man has yet fathomed the depths of the ever-living stream.