The Great Accuser of the brethren in a variety of ways attempts to insinuate the same dark doubts in the minds of believers, which we have spoken of in the preceding pages. He tries to shake their confidence in God,—in the veracity of His word, and the faithfulness of His dealings. He would lead them to discover in His providential dispensations what is inconsistent with His revealed character and will. In seasons particularly of outward calamity and trouble, when the body is racked with pain, its nerves unstrung, or its affections blighted and wounded—when the mind is oppressed and harassed, the soul in darkness—the Prince of this world, who times his assaults with such consummate skill, not unfrequently gains in such seasons a temporary triumph. The shadow of a cold scepticism passes over the soul. It is silent under the cry, "Where is thy God?"

Have any of you ever known this acutest anguish of the human spirit,—those appalling moments of doubt, when for a moment the whole citadel of truth seems to rock to its foundations,—when the soul becomes a dungeon with grated bars, or in which the light of heaven is transmitted through distorted glass, and the finger of unbelief is pointed inwards, with the old sneer, "Where is the God you were wont to boast of in your day of prosperity? Where is there evidence that one prayer you ever offered has been heard—one blessing you ever supplicated been granted—one evil you ever deprecated been averted or removed? Where one evidence of His hand in your allotments in life? These heavens have never broken silence! Hundreds of years have elapsed since His voice was last heard. Moreover, you have only some old parchment leaves written by converted Pharisees and Galilean fishermen to tell that Deity ever gave audible utterances out of the thick darkness. May not His very being be after all a fiction, a delusion—His Bible a worn-out figment which superstition and priestcraft have successfully palmed upon the world? Or if you do believe in a God and in a written revelation, have you not good reason, at all events, to infer from His adverse dealings that He cares nothing for you. He has proved Himself deaf to your cries. Where is the mercy in such an affliction as yours? He has crossed your every scheme, blasted your fairest gourds. His appointments are surely arbitrary. He takes useful lives, and leaves useless ones. He takes the wheat, and leaves the chaff. The chairs he empties are those of the kind and good, the loving and beloved. He leaves the wicked, and proud, and selfish, and profligate. Can there be a God on the earth? Where is the justice and judgment which are 'the habitation of His throne'—where the 'mercy and the truth' that are said to 'go before His face?'"

Such, you may say, are awful imaginations—too awful to speak of. But such there are! It is the horror of great darkness—spirits from the abyss sent to trouble the pools of ungodly thought, and stir them from their depths.

Ye who are thus assaulted, do you ever think, in the midst of these horrible insinuations, of One who had to bear the same? Think of that challenge which wrung a spotless human soul in the hour of its deepest anguish—"He trusted on the Lord that He would deliver him: let Him deliver him, seeing he delighted in Him." (Ps. xxii. 8.) It was the same taunt in His case as in yours! It was the cruel, poignant sneer, that He had, during all his lifetime of confiding filial love, been trusting to a falsehood,—that if God had really been His Father and He His Son, ten thousands of legions of angels would have been down now by the side of His cross to unbind His cords and set the Victim free!

Let the merciful, the wondrous forbearance of Christ be a lesson to ourselves in the endurance of the taunts of a scornful world and of the Father of lies. How easily might He have resented and answered the challenge by a descent from the cross, by having the pierced feet and hands set free,—the crown of thorns replaced by a diadem of glory, scattering the scoffing crew like chaff before the whirlwind! But in meek, majestic silence the Lamb of God suffers Himself to be bound, the Victim gives no struggle. Let them scoff on! He will save others, Himself he will not save! Nor did all their scoffing, their taunts and ridicule, tend for a solitary moment to shake His confidence in His heavenly Father. These fell like spent spray on the Rock of Ages. When the cup of trembling was in His hands, sinking humanity for the moment seemed to stagger. He breathed the prayer, "Let it pass from me." But immediately He added the condition of unswerving filial trust, "Nevertheless, O my Father, not as I will, but as Thou wilt." Even in the crisis of all, when He was mourning the eclipse of that Father's countenance—in that last gasp of superhuman agony, He proclaims, in answer to the taunts of earth and hell, His unshaken trust, "My God, my God!"

Comforting surely to the reviled, the ridiculed, and persecuted, that, severe and poignant as their sorrow is, they are undergoing only what their Lord and Master, in an inconceivably more awful form, experienced before them! Yes! think how He had to encounter the ingratitude of faithless, the treachery of trusted friends. The limbs He healed brought no succour—the tongues He unloosed lisped no accents of compassion—the eyes He unsealed gave no looks of love. Those lips that spake as never man spake, dropping wherever they went balm-words of mercy, now in vain make the appeal to the scoffing crowd, "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends, for the hand of God hath touched me!" Oh, when in deeper than the water-floods of Gilead, this wounded Hart of Heaven lay panting and bleeding under the curse,—when arrow after arrow was poured upon Him from the shafts of men, and the bitter cry resounded in His dying ears, Where is thy God?—how did He answer? what was His response? Listen to the apostle's sublime comment on that scene of blended love and suffering—"Who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not; but committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously."

As the face, the hidden face of God, beamed upon the Son of His love in the midst of that apparent desolation, so will it be, children of affliction and sorrow! with you. Others may see in your tears nothing but an indication of the desertion of God,—the visitations of His wrath and judgment. But believe it, these very experiences of trouble and calamity, of bereavement or death, are all meted out and apportioned for you in love—drop by drop, tear by tear. Seek to see God's hand in all that befalls you. Try, even in the most adverse providences, to rise above second causes. Be it with you as with David in his conduct towards Shimei. When the insulting Benjamite was hurling these cruel taunts against the exiled King and the sorrowing Father,—when his incensed soldiers, burning with indignation, were on the point of drawing their swords and inflicting summary vengeance on the scoffer—"Why should this dead dog," said Abishai, "curse my lord the king? let me go over, I pray thee, and take off his head"—David's reply is, "Nay! I hear not that man's voice—I see not that man's face—my eye is above the human instrument, on the God who sent him—'Let him curse on, for the Lord hath bidden him.'" (2 Sam xvi. 11.)

Trust God in the dark. Ah! it is easy for us to follow Him and to trust Him in sunshine. It is easy to follow our Leader as Israel did the pillar-cloud, when a glorious pathway was opened up for them through the tongue of the Red Sea—when they pitched under shady palms and gushing fountains, and heaven rained down bread on the hungry camp. But it is not so easy to follow when fountains fail and the pillar ceases to guide, and all outward and visible supports are withdrawn. But then is the time for faith to rise to the ascendant;—when the world is loud with its atheist sneer, THEN is the time to manifest a simple, child-like trust; and, amid baffling dispensations and frowning providences, to exclaim, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him!"

Yes—"troubled, we are NOT distressed; perplexed, we are NOT in despair; persecuted, we are NOT forsaken; cast down, we are NOT destroyed." We ARE ready, scoffing world! to answer the question, Where is thy God?

Child of Sickness! bound down for years on that lonely pillow!—the night-lamp thy companion—disease wasting thy cheeks and furrowing thy brow—weary days and nights appointed thee—tell me, Where is thy God? He is here, is the reply; His presence takes loneliness from my chamber and sadness from my countenance. His promises are a pillow for my aching head,—they point me onwards to that better land where "the inhabitant shall no more say, I am sick!"

Child of Poverty! Where is thy God? Can He visit this rude dwelling? Can God's promises be hung on these broken rafters? Can the light of His word illumine that cheerless hearth and sustain that bent figure shivering over its mouldering ashes? Yes! He is here. The lips of Truth that uttered the beatitude, "Blessed be ye poor," have not spoken in vain. Bound down by chill penury—forsaken and forgotten in old age—no footstep of mercy heard on my gloomy threshold—no lip of man to drop the kindly word—no hand of succour to replenish the empty cupboard—that God above has not deserted me. He has led me to seek and lay up my treasure in a home where want cannot enter, and where the beggar's hovel is transformed into the kingly mansion!

Bereaved One! Where is thy God? Where is the arm of Omnipotence thou wast wont to lean upon? Has He forgotten to be gracious? Has He mocked thy prayers, by trampling in the dust thy dearest and best, and left thee to pine and agonise in the bitterness of thy swept heart and home? Nay, He is here! He has swept down my fondest idol, but it was in order that He himself might occupy the vacant seat. I know Him too well to question the faithfulness of His word, and the fidelity of His dealings. I have never known what a God He was, till this hour of bitter trial overtook me! There was a "need be" in every tear—every death-bed—every grave!

Dying Man! the billows are around thee—the world is receding—the herald symptoms of approaching dissolution are gathering fast around thy pillow—the soul is pluming its wings for the immortal flight; ere memory begins to fade, and the mind becomes a waste,—ere the names of friends, when mentioned, will only be answered by a dull, vacant look, and then the hush of awful silence,—tell me, ere the last lingering ray of consciousness and thought has vanished, Where is thy God?

He is here! I feel the everlasting arms underneath and round about me. Heart and flesh are failing. The mists of death are dimming my eyes to the things below, but they are opening on the magnificent vistas of eternity. Yonder He is! seated amid armies of angels. "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!" "This God shall be my God for ever and ever!"