The Qualification Conferred by Suffering

‘The Lord said unto Moses, Lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with thee, and believe thee for ever.” — Hixop. xix, 9.

HEN a public man falls into adversity

it is deemed a specially sad thing. That

any life should be overclouded with grief is to the spectator a source of pain. But that one whose province it is to speak to the people should be so overclouded, that one should be thus hampered whose services to mankind are in constant request — this seems a positive waste. We are disposed to say, “If God wishes this man to speak to the people and to be a source of faith to the people, why does He let him be overclouded, why does He not leave his energies unimpaired for the great work he has to do?” The passage before us answers that

question. It says that for such a man an experience of the thick cloud is itself a source of power. We see one of the most public men that ever lived made to pass through a thick cloud. We are told that this thick cloud, so far from being a hiding of God, was the very coming of God to his soul. We are informed that the object of the cloud was to give him greater eloquence as a speaker, greater force as a teacher, greater influence as a leader. And is it not ever so. No man can impress his religion upon his brother unless he himself has met God in the cloud. If he would command the belief of his fellow-men it is not enough that he should have seen God; he must have seen Him in the storm. Has he lived all the day in a garden. Has he dwelt amid perennial fruits and fiowers. Has he basked in perpetual sunshine — beneath skies that never lower and amid faces that never frown. Then, his faith is a very natural thing, but it is in no sense an evidential thing; it is the faith of a child. What the world wants to see is a faith that can hold by a God who walks upon the waves — a faith that has not been sunk in the surgings nor broken by the breezes. It finds in such a faith what one finds in a commercial bank which has borne unhurt the strain of a financial crisis. Our trust is in proportion to the thickness of the cloud through which the bank was floated; we lean most heavily on the battered spar.

My soul, despise not the moments of thy clouding! Think not they are waste moments — moments that have withdrawn thee from the stream of life! They will bring thee nearer to the stream than ever thou wouldst have been without them. They are at present a solitude; they have called thee into a desert place apart from the crowd. But hast thou never read how the crowd came to the man in the desert — to John in the wilderness. Why did they come to hin — the man clothed in camel’s hair, the reed broken by the wind, the feeder on locusts and wild honey? It was because they felt that when such a man speaks of God he is worth hearing. They felt that, when a battered soul claims to see an opened heaven and a descending dove of peace, there must be something to be said for God, something of which the world knows not. It was because he preached “in the wilderness” that men came. They came to see the marvel of a faith that could live on so poor a fare, sing to so bad an accompaniment, smile in so mean a garb, soar on so feeble a wing. So, my soul, shall it be with thee. Thy desert shall be thy metropolis. Men shall throng thee because of thy carol in the cloud. The sad shall listen to thy night:

song. The heart-sore shall hear thine evening hymn. The restless shall run to thy rainbow. They shall point to the light in the valley. They shall gaze at the diamond in the dust. They shall view the high rock amid the waves. They shall mark the star in the darkness. They shall hail the dove in the deluge. They shall hear the music on the waters. They shall be glad that a still small voice can be heard amid the thunder and the earthquake. Magnify thy cloud, O my soul!