---

There are a hundred men looking for storm where there is one man looking for sunshine. My object will be to get you and myself into the delightful habit of making the best of everything.

I. YOU OUGHT TO MAKE THE BEST OF ALL YOUR FINANCIAL MISFORTUNES. During the panic a few years ago you all lost money. Compression: retrenchment. Who did not feel the necessity of it? Did yon make the best of this? Are you aware of how narrow an escape you made? Suppose you had reached the fortune toward which you were rapidly going? You would have been as proud as Lucifer. How few men have succeeded largely in a financial sense, and yet maintained their simplicity and religious consecration! Not one man out of a hundred. The same Divine band that crushed your storehouse, your bank, your office, your insurance company, lifted you out of destruction. The day you honestly suspended in business made your fortune for eternity. "Oh!" you say, "I could get along very well myself, but I am so disappointed that I cannot leave a competence for my children." The same financial misfortune that is going to save your soul will save your children. The best inheritance a young man can have is the feeling that tie has to fight his own battle, and that life is a struggle into which he must throw body, mind, and soul, or be disgracefully worsted.

II. AGAIN, I REMARK, YOU OUGHT TO MAKE THE BEST OF YOUR BEREAVEMENTS. The whole tendency is to brood over these separations, and to give much time to the handling of mementoes of the departed, and to make long visitations to the cemetery, and to say, "Oh, I can never look up again; my hope is gone; my courage is gone; my religion is gone; my faith in God is gone! Oh, the wear, and tear, and exhaustion of this loneliness!" The most frequent bereavement is the loss of children. Instead of the complete safety into which that child has been lifted, would you like to hold it down to the risks of this mortal state? Would you like to keep it out on a sea in which there have been more shipwrecks than safe voyages? Is it not a comfort to you to know that that child, instead of being besoiled and flung into the mire of sin, is swung clear into the skies? So it ought to be that you should make the best of all your bereavements. The fact that you have so many friends in heaven will make your own departure very cheerful. The more friends here, the more bitter good-byes; the more friends there, the more glorious welcomes. Though all around may be dark, see you not the bright light in the clouds — that light the irradiated faces of your glorified kindred?

III. So also I would have you MAKE THE BEST OF YOUR SICKNESSES. When you see one move off with elastic step and in full physical vigour, sometimes you become impatient with your lame foot. When a man describes an object a mile off, and you cannot see it at all, you become impatient of your dim eye. When you hear of a healthy man making a great achievement, you become impatient with your depressed nervous system or your dilapidated health. I wilt tell you how you can make the worst of it. Brood over it; brood over all these illnesses, and your nerves will become more twitchy, and your dyspepsia more aggravated, and your weakness more appalling. But that is the devil's work, to tell you how to make the worst of it: it is my work to show you a bright light in the clouds. Which of the Bible men most attract your attention? You say, Moses, Job, Jeremiah, Paul. Why, what a strange thing it is that you have chosen those who were physically disordered! Moses — I know he was nervous from the blow he gave the Egyptian. Job — his blood was vitiated and diseased, and his skin distressfully eruptive. Jeremiah had enlargement of the spleen. Who can doubt it who reads Lamentations? Paul — he had a lifetime sickness which the commentators have been guessing about for years, not knowing exactly what the apostle meant by "a thorn in the flesh." I gather from all this that physical disorder may be the means of grace to the soul. The best view of the delectable mountains is through the lattice of the sick room.

IV. Again, you ought TO MAKE THE BEST OF LIFE'S FINALITY. There are many people that have an idea that death is the submergence of everything pleasant by everything doleful. Oh, what an ado about dying! We get so attached to the malarial marsh in which we live that we are afraid to go up and live on the hilltop. We are alarmed because vacation is coming. Eternal sunlight, and best programme of celestial minstrels and hallelujah no inducement. Let us stay here and keep cold and ignorant and weak. Do not introduce us to the saints of old. I am amazed at myself and at yourself for this infatuation under which we all rest. Men, you would suppose, would get frightened at having to stay in this world instead of getting frightened at having to go toward heaven. I congratulate anybody who has a right to die. By that I mean through sickness you cannot avert, or through accident you cannot avoid — your work consummated. "Where did they bury Lily?" said one little child to another. "Oh!" she replied, "they buried her in the ground." "What! in the cold ground?" "Oh no, no! not in the cold ground, but in the warm ground, where ugly seeds become faithful flowers."

(T. De Witt Talmage.)

---

---

KJV: And now men see not the bright light which is in the clouds: but the wind passeth, and cleanseth them.

WEB: Now men don't see the light which is bright in the skies, but the wind passes, and clears them.