workmanship must be good also; and we may securely trust that, before He is done with us, He will make out of us something that will be to His glory, no matter how unlike this we may as yet feel ourselves to be.

The Psalmist seemed to delight in repeating over and over again this blessed refrain, "for the Lord is good." It would be worth while for you to take your Concordances and see how often he says it. And he exhorted everybody to join him in saying it. "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so" was his earnest cry. We must join our voices to his-The Lord is good-The Lord is good. But we must not say it with our lips only, and then by our actions give the lie to our words. We must "say" it with our whole being, with thought, word, and action, so that people will see we really mean it, and will be convinced that it is a tremendous fact.

A great many things in God's divine providences do not look like goodness to the eye of sense, and in reading the Psalms we wonder perhaps how the Psalmist could say, after some of the things he records, "for His mercy endureth forever." But faith sits down before mysteries such as these, and says, "The Lord is good, therefore all that He does must be good, no matter how it looks, and I can wait for His explanations."

A housekeeping illustration has often helped me here. If I have a friend whom I know to be a good housekeeper, I do not trouble over the fact that at house-cleaning time things in her house may seem to be more or less upset, carpets up, and furniture shrouded in coverings, and even perhaps painting and decorating making some rooms uninhabitable. I say to myself, "My friend is a good housekeeper, and although things look so uncomfortable now, all this upset is only because she means in the end to make

it far more comfortable than ever it was before." This world is God's housekeeping; and although things at present look grievously upset, yet, since we know that He is good, and therefore must be a good Housekeeper, we may be perfectly sure that all this present upset is only to bring about in the end a far better state of things than could have been without it. I dare say we have all felt at times as though we could have done God's housekeeping better than He does it Himself, but, when we realize that God is good, we can feel this no longer. And it comforts me enormously, when the world seems to me to be going all wrong, just to say to myself, "It is not my housekeeping, but it is the Lord's; and the Lord is good, therefore His housekeeping must be good too; and it is foolish for me to trouble." A deeply taught Christian was asked by a despairing child of God, "Does not the world look to you like a wreck ?" "Yes," was the reply, in a tone of cheerful confidence, "Yes, like the wreck of a bursting seed." Any of us who have watched the first sproutings of an oak tree from the heart of a decaying acorn will understand what this means. Before the acorn can bring forth the oak, it must become itself a wreck. No plant ever came from any but a wrecked seed.

Our Lord uses this fact to teach us the meaning of His processes with us. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but, if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

The whole explanation of the apparent wreckage of the world at large, or of our own personal lives in particular, is here set forth. And, looked at in this light, we can understand how it is that the Lord can be good, and yet can permit the existence of sorrow and wrong in the world He has created, and in the lives of the human beings He loves.

It is His very goodness that compels Him to permit it. For He knows that, only through such apparent wreckage, can the fruition of His glorious purposes for us be brought to pass. And we whose hearts also long for that fruition, will, if we understand His ways, be able to praise Him for all His goodness, even when things seem hardest and most mysterious.

The Apostle tells us that the will of God is "good and acceptable, and perfect." The will of a good God cannot help being "good"-in fact, it must be perfect; and, when we come to know this, we always find it " acceptable"; that is, we come to love it. I am convinced that all trouble about submitting to the will of God would disappear, if once we could see clearly that His will is good. We struggle and struggle in vain to submit to a will that we do not believe to be good, but when we see that it is really good, we submit to it with delight. We want it to be accomplished. Our hearts spring out to meet it.

"I worship Thee, sweet Will of God!

And all Thy ways adore;

And, every day I live, I seem

To love Thee more and more.
I love to kiss each print where Thou
Hast set Thine unseen feet:

I cannot fear Thee, blessed Will!
Thine empire is so sweet."

Time fails me to tell all that I might of the infinite goodness of the Lord. Each one must "taste and see" for themselves. And, if they will but do it honestly and faithfully, the words of the Psalmist will become true of them: "They shall abundantly utter the memory of Thy great goodness, and shall sing of Thy righteousness."

VIII

THE LORD OUR DWELLING-PLACE

"Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations."

THE comfort or discomfort of our outward lives depends more largely upon the dwelling-place of our bodies than upon almost any other material thing; and the comfort or discomfort of our inward life depends similarly upon the dwelling-place of our souls.

Our dwelling-place is the place where we live, and not the place we merely visit. It is our home. All the interests of our earthly lives are bound up in our homes; and we do all we can to make them attractive and comfortable. But our souls need a comfortable dwelling-place even more than our bodies; for inward comfort, as we all know, is of far greater importance than outward; and, where the soul is full of peace and joy, outward surroundings are of comparatively little account.

It is of vital importance, then, that we should find out definitely where our souls are living. The Lord declares that He has been our dwelling-place in all generations, but the question is, Are we living in our dwelling-place? The Psalmist says of the children of Israel that "They wandered in the wilderness, in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them." And I am afraid there are many wandering souls in the Church of Christ, whom this description of the wandering Israelites would exactly fit. All their Christian lives they have been wandering in a spiritual wilderness, and have found no city to dwell in, and, hungry and thirsty, their souls have fainted in them. And yet all the

while the dwelling-place of God has been standing wide open, inviting them to come in and take up their abode there forever. Our Lord Himself urges this invitation upon us. "Abide in Me," He says, "and I in you"; and He goes on to tell us what are the blessed results of this abiding, and what are the sad consequences of not abiding.

The truth is, our souls are made for God. He is our natural home, and we can never be at rest anywhere else. "My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God." We always shall hunger and faint for the courts of the Lord, as long as we fail to take up our abode there.

"God only is the creature's home;

Though rough and straight the road
Yet nothing else can satisfy

The soul that longs for God."

How shall we describe this Divine dwelling-place? David describes it when he says, "The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; the God of my rock; in Him will I trust; He is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my Saviour; Thou savest me from violence."

So we see that our dwelling-place is also our fortress, and our high tower, and our rock, and our refuge. We all know what a fortress is. It is a place of safety, where everything that is weak and helpless can be hidden from the enemy, and kept in security. And when we are told that God, who is our dwelling-place, is also our fortress, it can mean only one thing, and that is, that if we will but live in our dwelling-place, we shall be perfectly safe and secure from every assault of every possible enemy that can