must all that call forth!  The wise nurse is patient with her passionate, greedy, untidy, disobedient child.  She does not cast it out of doors, she does not run and leave it, she does not kill it because all these things have been and still are in its sad little heart.  Her power for good with such a child lies just in her pity, in her compassion, and in her patience with her child.  And the child that is in all of us is to be treated in the same patient, hopeful, believing, forgiving, divine way.  We should all be with ourselves as God is with us.  He knoweth our frame.  He remembereth that we are dust.  He shows all patience toward us.  He does not look for great things from us.  He does not break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax.  He shall not fail nor be discouraged till He have set judgment in the earth.  And so shall not we.

5.  And, then,—­it is a sufficiently startling thing to say, but—­we must learn to be patient with God also.  All our patience, and all the exercises of it, if we think aright about it, all run up in the long-run into patience with God.  But there are some exercises of patience that have to do directly and immediately with God and with God alone.  When any man’s heart has become fully alive to God and to the things of God; when he begins to see and feel that he lives and moves and has his being in God; then everything that in any way affects him is looked on by him as come to him from God.  Absolutely, all things.  The very weather that everybody is so atheistic about, the climate, the soil he labours, the rain, the winter’s cold and the summer’s heat,—­true piety sees all these things as God’s things, and sees God’s immediate will in the disposition and dispensation of them all.  He feels the untameableness of his tongue in the indecent talk that goes on everlastingly about the weather.  All these things may be without God to other men, as they once were to him also, but you will find that the truly and the intelligently devout man no longer allows himself in such unbecoming speech.  For, though he cannot trace God’s hand in all the changes of the seasons, in heat and cold, in sunshine and snow, yet he is as sure that God’s wisdom and will are there as that Scripture is true and the Scripture-taught heart.  ’Great is our Lord, and His understanding is infinite.  Who covereth the heavens with clouds, and prepareth rain for the earth, and maketh the grass to grow upon the mountains.  He giveth snow like wool; He scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes; He casteth forth His ice like morsels.  Who can stand before his cold?’ Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.  Here are they that keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus Christ.