Afflictions Working for Good.
"It is good for me that I have been afflicted," said the psalmist, "that I might learn thy statutes." "Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now have I kept thy word." Ps. 119:67, 71. David is not the only one, however, that God has had to lay on his back that he might be made to look upward. When in health, strength, and prosperity, even Christians are in danger of becoming too much like Bunyan's "man with the muck-rake," who would not look up, but persisted in raking to himself "the straws, the small sticks and dust of the floor," while "there stood one over his head with a celestial crown in his hand," which he proffered him for his rake. The following extract from the preface to a recently published edition of a book written by Professor M. Hegard, of Copenhagen, who was regarded aforetime as a skeptic, is given in one of our British exchanges as something "worthy of careful attention." It is not only "another testimony to the worthlessness of all confidences in anything less than the word of God," but a good illustration of the psalmist's words, and of how lessons are learned under the rod. "The experiences and sufferings of my life have shattered the foundation on which I formerly thought to build. Filled with a sincere faith in the excellence of science, I believed I had found in it a sure refuge for all eventualities. This illusion has vanished. When the tempest came, and my heart was plunged in sorrow, the cables of science snapped like threads. Then I seized upon the succor which many others had laid hold of before me; I sought and found peace in the faith of God. Since then, while I have not abandoned science, I have assigned it a different place in my life." —Sel.