your choice, the only choice which the Lord leaves you. Choose at once, for the sorrow comes hastening on. Escape is blankly impossible, but you may meet it with a smile of welcome, with a song of triumph. Fiercely as the storm may beat, this anchor at any rate will hold. "It is a faithful saying that if we die with Him we shall live with Him;' "if we suffer, we shall reign." How faithful, they know full well "who received the word with much affliction and with joy of the Holy Ghost," and have passed up to the recompenses of eternity.

185

X.

THE TWO SORROWS.

"For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for welldoing than for evil-doing."—I. Peter iii. 17.

MUCH of this first epistle of Peter is occupied with the consolation of sufferers-the suffering sons of God. It was written to Hebrew Christians; Peter himself being a Hebrew of intense national sympathies and of marked national character. The suffering sons of God involved an idea which was not a little perplexing to one who had been trained in the Hebrew school. "Let the wicked suffer, let the saints be happy," was the formula which came most readily to Hebrew lips. It expressed the notion of the right order of things which ran through all the national literature, and it was deeply ingrained in the popular heart. A far truer and nobler philosophy of life is to be found, by those who will search for it, in the Hebrew writings; but the first Psalm contains the pith of the ideas which were popular in the Hebrew, as in some other and more modern, religious philosophy.

Peter was a man of the people, and his ideas ranged naturally with the popular views of his

time. Paul too was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, but he had been trained in a higher and more thoughtful school. Perhaps it is not too much to say, that there was something in the nature of Saul of Tarsus, which enabled him to look more deeply into the mystery of sorrow, than could the strong, rough fisherman of Galilee a man by nature of simple ideas, simple habits, and simple hopes.

Paul's

was much more complex and profound. The acute thinker, the accomplished scholar, the intensely sensitive and sympathetic man, he had in him an instinct which prepared him for a life of toil, sacrifice and suffering, in ministry to his fellows. Under no conditions could life have gone with him simply and easily; his was a nature to fathom to its very depths the mystery of the Passion and the Cross.

Into the mind of Peter these ideas would seem to have wrought themselves but slowly. He took upon himself to rebuke the Master, when first He unveiled the Cross before his sight. "Then Peter took Him, and began to rebuke Him, saying, Be it far from Thee, Lord; this shall not be unto Thee. But He turned and said unto Peter, Get thee behind Me, Satan: thou art an offence unto Me."

The need of the suffering continued to be veiled from him. He it was who would take the sword to spare his Master the agony by which a whole world was to be saved. "That be far from Thee, Lord," he was saying again, when he drew the sword to smite the captors of Jesus; and we may be sure that his

voice was not the least loud among those who uttered the lamentation, "We trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel, and this is the third day since these things were done." The prophesied resurrection seems quite to have passed away from his thoughts. The women's words were to the apostles "but idle tales, and they believed them not." He had much to learn about the meaning of Calvary. “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken; ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?"

Peter, beyond all men, profited by the baptism of the day of Pentecost. He stands forth a new man from that hour. It was as though a veil had been lifted from around his spirit, and the light of the truth which through the Lord's words had been dimly struggling into his mind, had flashed on him in all its brightness. From that moment the Lord's counsel was quite clear to him. As plainly, as grandly, as Paul, he deals in this epistle with the mystery of sorrow; and he connects, as clearly as Paul, the sufferings of the saints with the sufferings of their Lord: the disciple suffering with the Master; the limb sharing the experience of the Head.

The suffering sons of God! "It is better, if it be the will of God, that ye suffer for well doing than for evil doing." "Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God, commit the keeping of their souls to Him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator." Perhaps the true children of God,

the faithful, the Israelites indeed, felt, not unnaturally, that when their Messiah should appear, he would release them from the cloud of sorrow and bring them out into the serene daylight of peace and joy. Who should be happy in this universe, if not the pure-hearted, the gentle, the loving, the patient, the believing! Must there not be some flaw in the constitution of the Kingdom of God, if such are left to be a prey to sorrow, wounds, and death? "For thy sake we are killed all the day long, we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter," describes but a poor heritage for sons.

dawn of the

One hardly

Doubtless they thought that when the Kingdom of Heaven should come, their long night of agony would be ended, and that the day of triumph would be in the sky. knows which would be sadder, their heart or their Master's, when He announced that He had not come to send peace upon the earth, but a sword. It is stern work to meet an enemy's weapon; but it is infinitely sadder to trouble the convictions and to blight the hopes of a friend. This sadness in its fullest measure fell to the lot of our Lord. He knew that his friends were looking for rest, comfort, and honour; He knew that the heritage which He would leave to them would be exile, distress, and shame. "In the world ye shall have tribulation," was all that He could say to them about the present; and a sharper pang must have shot through His heart than through theirs, as the sorrowful words dropped from His lips.