By the Very Rev. W. Lefroy, D.D., Dean of Norwich.

"Thou, which hast showed me great and sore troubles, shalt quicken me again, and shalt bring me up again from the depths of the earth."—Psalm lxxi. 20.

Nor can we allow ourselves to question the dictum. The infant's wail precedes the infant's weal. The cry of helplessness is heard in the cradle. The child's deep sigh anticipates the child's sweet smile. And although sunny childhood sometimes passes as if the pitiless law of hereditary trouble were suspended, yet no serious thinker can hesitate to accept the proposition, that trouble is in the ratio in which life's meaning and purpose are experienced, or divine love accepted and enjoyed. If a man has no trouble, it is because he has not yet practically realised the significance of existence. He is still free from those social, domestic, and personal influences, the derangement of any of which brings agony by day and sleeplessness by night. Or, again, it may be because he has learnt the loftiest and yet the lowliest lesson from his Lord, by accepting the Gospel of Gethsemane, "Thy will be done." But excepting the persons so classified by social isolation or spiritual resignation, there is not on earth an exception to the law of the human race being "born unto trouble." Yea, more. Constituted as we are, we live in the presence of the grim enigma, that the object which gave us the highest joy can give us the most excruciating sorrow. Nor can that existence be anything else than mournful whose happiness or misery depends upon any earthly object.

This statement may be illustrated by every condition in life—domestic, physical, intellectual. The genius across whose mental firmament the lights and shadows of history travelled, and by whom they were arrested, analysed, and grouped in their course; the great brain of the great worker whose intrepid excursions into the realms of the past and the present, with a view to tabulating the rise of civilisation—the patient and profound Mr. Buckle, is absorbed by mental enjoyment. He lives, and moves, and has his being in men and manners, among maps and manuscripts. He makes a grand discovery. He keeps the secret for twenty years. He repairs to Damascus to recruit for literary service. He is stricken with fever, and dies with the words of his intellectuality on his parched lips, "My book, my book! I shall never finish my book!" Here his highest joy was his keenest sorrow. So in physical life. There have been men who seemed at one time as if they were created without nerves. Their arms were brawny, muscular, and mighty. Their limbs were firm and fine. They seemed God's highest type of organic life. They rejoiced in their strength and in their youth. But disease assailed, or dissipation punished, and retribution appeared in feebleness, exhaustion, and debility. Youthful feats were forbidden. The sports of the past recalled a youth of virtue and purity; and then came the sigh which told that, even physically, the source of our joy becomes the spring of our sorrow. And need I elaborate details to establish the place of this doctrine in domestic life? Do we not know this from the gloomy history of the orphan child, the widowed mother, the bereaved sister, brother, friend? You know that to love dearly means to have a skeleton in your house. The object of your love causes a thousand smiles to play in your eye, and to break on your countenance; but the shade of that object is mocking your mirth, and is only waiting a few rounds of the clock to compensate mirth with misery.

Nor is this all. There are sorrows far more terrible than those of sickness or the cemetery. A living sorrow defies rivalry. It has a fearful pre-eminence in woe. A wayward, wild, debauched youth; an estranged husband; an embittered, irascible, worldly wife; a stormy, or, what is far worse, a sullen home; these are amongst the darkest illustrations of the doctrine, that our sighs are in the track of our smiles; our delights become our dangers; yea, it sometimes seems as if affection became idiotic, and then, like the raving maniac, we laugh and cry together. So we are "born to trouble." This being so, it is important to listen to testimony concerning the remedy which troubled souls have found efficacious. If we have one such man, able and willing to give his fellow-sufferers a cure for care, it is surely prudent to hear what he has to say. Accordingly, let me ask you to follow me while I try to establish a cure for all afflicted souls from the experience, conviction, and anticipation of a royal mourner. I invite you to come with me to the side of a man like one of us. Listen to him struggling up the great altar-stairs of faith sustained by love, and, as he peers into the Unseen, he speaks as if to one warm with life, charged with ardent sympathy, and he says, "Oh, what troubles and adversities hast Thou shown me; and yet didst Thou turn and refresh me!"

The first step in this study is to be clear as to the nature of the troubles God showed David. There was, then, the personal and the spiritual trouble of backsliding, consequent upon his murder of Uriah for his base purpose. And here we must discriminate. The trouble of David about Bathsheba was not sent by God; God permitted it; but in the heartless and cold-blooded plot in the tyrannical insolence and diabolical dastardliness of its execution—in the coarse, callous, and criminal height of its succeeding guilty rapture—it was of Satan, of sin, of David. For three-quarters of a year David played fast and loose with God and conscience; and it was when Nathan scared him that God showed him the trouble. Then came anguish, remorse, penitence. Then came the sorrowful sighing of the soul—all the greater in the awakening because it had slept so soundly and so long. Then came that lamentation over lost virtue, the penitential Fifty-first Psalm. It is the expression of a man lacerated by conscience. He seems to bleed at every pore. The agitation and alarm and agony are piteous beyond description. He appears in this psalm to look in every direction, and the ghost of his crime haunts him. Within, without, above, below, behind, beyond, he can see the furies of justice as the embassied troublers of his life. Original depravity, actual outrage, a heart black with the Egyptian darkness of fostered treachery, the warrior slaughtered by his mandate, the blood-guiltiness staining his soul, and then the wail ringing in the ears of God, "Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me"—all these may be compared to a spiritual chamber of horrors, in which David found himself after the startling visit of Nathan.

These were some of the troubles God showed him. And their cause introduced more of a domestic, not to say of a political, kind. The sin brought scandal and reproach on the Church of God. The enemies blasphemed. Then Jehovah, vindicating His character for justice before the world, avenging the atrocious murder of Uriah, sent a series of domestic afflictions upon David unparalleled in human experience. One scene—a nameless scene—has its miserable match in the brutal bestiality of the Empire, when the sceptre of Rome was in the hands of a corpse. But the other experiences are easily related. They are as the outcome of a curse which hung heavily on the royal house. Amnon, the eldest son, was slain by young Absalom, who waited two years for an opportunity. This severed Absalom from home for three years. He then, by a singular artifice, returned, and won the hearts of the people by his consummate and accomplished address, his handsome presence, and adroit demeanour. His aged and royal father's statesmen proved false to the king, and one in particular advised the murder of David and a revolution. At length the conspiracy grew in defiance and dimension. David was obliged to flee from the capital. His flight was far more humiliating than that of the French emperor from Paris. Napoleon had not to mourn over the treason of his son as the cause of his exile. This was David's anguish. He ascended the Mount of Olives and looked back upon the city of palaces he had founded and ornamented—the seat for a generation of his power, his glory, his happiness. He was leaving it a miserable fugitive, driven forth by the nation he had established and the child he had reared. He could not, he did not, disguise his sorrow. With bared head and uncovered feet the exile began his pilgrimage, and every step the old king took recalled the crime and sin of earlier years, while it remained for one Shimei to load him with the bitterest and most contemptuous execrations. Then came the crisis. Such of the army as remained loyal engaged in battle with the revolutionary forces attracted to Absalom. David begged that his unhappy son might be spared in the conflict. The war began and issued in the success of the royalists. The first question of the venerable monarch was, "Is the young man Absalom safe?" He then learnt that order was re-established, but at the cost of Absalom's life. He was accidentally hanged, and while hanging he was speared by David's commander-in-chief.

These are amongst the troubles—political, domestic, and spiritual—which God permitted to fall upon David; and yet this very David has courage amid the havoc of holiness, the misery of exile, the torture of outraged parental affection, and political insurrection. That courageous confidence is in a person: he realises God. This conviction is unshaken amid his chequered life and history; indeed, all through the din of revolution, the grief of a homeless and worse than childless existence, there is one ever-recurring belief: "God my help," "God my refuge," "God my shield." In this belief he brings back to God every trouble God sent to him. Hence we have these psalms, written by David, as agony after agony swept in upon his soul. Nor did it seem to signify how different one sorrow might be from another. The old cry, the same cry, is raised to a personal God. When Saul sought his life through jealousy; when Jonathan was slain in battle; when he himself had fallen into sin, and then was aroused—now by the whisperings of reclaiming grace, now by the booming billows of divine justice; when he bowed his head in shame, and the fierce light that beat about his court gleamed on his dark soul; when he tottered up the heights of Olivet, an impotent outcast, betrayed by his courtiers, deserted by his troops, and exiled by the unnatural rebellion and heartless perfidy of his son—in these experiences, so fearful, overwhelming, and varied, he saw God showing him the trouble. As the hand that sent it was ever the same, so from the heart that received it there arose ever and anon the same plea—"Have mercy upon me, O Lord"; "Make haste to help me"; "O Lord, make no long tarrying"; "I am poor and needy"; "O be not Thou far from me, for trouble is near at hand." And then, as if realising the apostasy, desertion, and faithlessness of his friends and forces, he adds, "There is none to help."

We know how these earnest and anxious entreaties were heard: "Thou didst turn and refresh me"; "Through Thee have I been holden up ever since I was born"; "My mouth shall speak of Thy salvation all the day long; for I know no end thereof." But further. This acknowledgment of God as a "very present help in trouble" is followed by a prophecy, and that of nothing less than the resurrection—"Thou shalt bring me up again from the depths of the earth"; so that David's sorrow, when brought humbly and heartily to God, was followed by divine refreshment then, and hope of resurrection hereafter. And a well-founded hope it was, because the trouble sent by God produced a grand moral result when laid before Him Who sent it. It had a purifying influence which made his mind speed on to the resurrection day. In its anticipation he was but yielding to the influence of a life higher than that he lived before his sorrow, and which sought enjoyment and exercise loftier and still loftier. This he, by faith, foresaw, in the anticipation of that rest to which his trouble sent him, and for the appreciation of which his trouble purified him.

So we have here in the spiritual world an instructive and encouraging illustration of what frequently occurs in the physical. We have purification by pain; refreshment out of ruin. So have I seen this grand law asserting the governance of its God in those Alpine crags on which the stars seem to pause. There on those storm-scalped peaks the climber feasts on the panorama spread by God's own hand, in winding river, sapphire lake, everlasting hill, sentinelled by a forest of pines, dressed in the matchless sombre of Alpine green or shrouded by the spotless snows of heaven. I have witnessed the troubles of the atmosphere. The bursting rain-cloud hangs low, the light recedes, the darkness deepens, the wind moans; and then the full-toned thunder roars, and the long lines of fire, angular and electric, leap from fissures in the firmament. The artillery of the elements is deafening, and its echoes rumble in the distance like the mutterings of imprisoned spirits. The storm is over. The calm succeeds. The clouds become brighter and brighter still. The sun peeps out here and there in a rift of the heavens. The air is fresh and keen and pure. The vegetation is bright and green. The rivulets and mountain torrents ripple and rush rejoicing. As we see this, we are reminded of the analogies of God's government; yea, if we could put a preacher on every peak, a tongue in every valley, Nature would minister to grace, and from each would come the response of the royal poet to the call of God. The world physical would raise the ecstatic antiphon to the world spiritual: "O what great troubles and adversities hast Thou showed me, and yet didst Thou turn and refresh me!"

But these words have a still richer meaning in their bearing upon the religious fortunes of the Hebrew race, the Messianic glory of the Redeemer, and the present and future position of His believing people. I believe that Israel's troubles are to issue in Israel's refreshment, and even in national resurrection. Her captivities and dispersions, her degradation and exile, are but the preludes to her rise, return, and splendour. God has sworn it; His word is bound to it. His promise is as certain as though it were performed. But we may merely mention this as a conviction, in order to pass on and recognise in these words the history of Jesus Christ. From that cradle and cottage home; from that carpenter's bench where He toiled; from that country, with its hills and dales, and lanes and lakes, where He preached; from the Temple which He glorified and abrogated; from the cross where He died; from the tomb which He vacated; from the throne of mediation, where He sympathises, intercedes and governs; from earth below, and heaven above, the voice of Jesus sounds o'er land and sea, filling angelic souls with adoration, and human hearts with hope, announcing, "O what great troubles and adversities hast Thou showed Me!" He was betrayed, despised, and rejected. He looked for some to have pity on Him, but there was no man; neither found He any to comfort Him. He was maligned and misunderstood. The malice of His enemies omitted but one sin in their resolve to blacken His character, and it remained for the patronising blasphemy of Renan to insinuate that one as possible. He was accused of deceit, though infallible; He was slandered as a drunkard, though immaculate; yea, the detraction of His foes did not spare Him the agony of being charged with the commission of a sin as disgusting as it is brutal—that of gluttony. He was arraigned as a felon, and died as an impostor. But beyond all was the sin of which these were but the symptoms. This was the trouble, "great and sore," which God showed Him. This was the agony of agonies to the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. Its fell pressure is the meaning of the tradition that Jesus was often seen to weep, but never once to smile. To this trouble we trace the overpowering experiences of the fainting, prostrate Christ in the garden; of the wailing and woe-bearing Christ on the cross. Yet there was the refreshment; there was behind it all the unchangeable love of God the Father—"Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My Life that I might take it again." There was the satisfaction of His soul, in saving the race He died to redeem by representation; there was, above all, the guarantee of that redemption in being brought "from the depths of the earth again."

And if we were to follow the history of His Church, that history would be a living commentary on the experience of David and of David's Lord: divinely sent trouble, divinely sought and divinely sent refreshment, issuing in spiritual resurrection. Is not this the account many have to give of sorrow, succour, and salvation? You were weak: you are now strong. You were "choked with cares," and sought relief in a flood of tears: you are now able to leave the burden of your cares with Him Who "careth for you"; while your eyes, once red with agony, are now bright with praise, gratitude, and hope. Remembering what you were, and now recognising what you are, you may adopt the language of David, "I am become a wonder unto many, but my sure trust is in Thee"; or, taking a fuller view and a finer tone, you will ring out the litany of deliverance, and chant the song of praise and blessing, "O what great troubles and adversities has Thou showed me; and yet didst Thou turn and refresh me."

This present refreshment is a prophecy of future resurrection. It leads all the afflicted children of God on to the grand climax in sin, sorrow, and all the trouble to which we are born. Then the cup of universal affliction shall be full. The waters of our pilgrimage shall be sweetened, and changed into the bright, clear, rosy wine of immortality. Then farewell, sorrow; farewell, weakness; agony, ache, desolation, and sin, we bid you a final and a glad farewell. Then shall rise upon this scene of change and uncertainty, where pain and pleasure are so intermingled and combined, the sun that knows no setting, the everlasting day that knows no night. Then shall the children of God, the "children of the resurrection," gathered from every known and unknown region, race, and age, rise to the rapture of the saints, and, defying the immeasurable weight of all the ocean's pressure—for the sea shall give up its dead—shattering the manacles with which corruption had long bound the germ of incorruption, they shall "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye," greet the Saviour Who loved them, with a greeting worthy the Lamb that was slain; worthy the grandest event in the annals of earth and heaven; while high above the din of the last crash of worlds, yea, louder than the storm which marches on the ruins of creation, shall rise the anthem of royal and even wretched and relieved experience—"Thou hast brought me from the depths of the earth again."