What God calls our good is not what we call our happiness. Happiness for us is success, health, glory, fortune, the affection of mankind, pleasure; in the sight of God the good for us is holiness, is salvation. God does not to-day attach happiness to faith, and success to piety; if He did so, we should obey Him in order to be happy, and God would be served only by mercenaries. But it is true only in appearance that all men suffer alike. Question believers, and they will tell you that in the severest trials they have discovered signs of the Divine goodness, Now, even when outwardly all seems to be identical in the life of him who loves God and of him who does not, we must admit that events will work upon men according to the mind with which they are accepted. Behold in nature those forces which frighten us by their power of destructiveness. In the plant, beneath a lovely flower, is a subtle poison; in the atmosphere is the hurricane and the electricity. Put the savage in presence of those forces, he will find only suffering and death. But the scientist extracts that poison, and finds in it a remedy for his ills; to the breath of the wind he spreads the sails of his mills or of his ships; he lays hold of the lightning, and upon an imperceptible thread cast into the depths of the ocean he commands it to carry his thoughts to the ends of the world. Well, this is a faithful picture of the manner in which the believing soul can turn to his good all the events of life, all the evils which overwhelm it. Here is failure, mourning, suffering alighting on a Christian soul. Well, you will see that soul seizing those terrible forces which might crush it under their strokes, humbling itself, praying, blessing, and drawing from what might be its death the secret of true greatness, of spiritual triumph and of holiness.