INTO every life, if it is to be a broad, sympathetic, and useful life, must come some struggle, some sorrow, some tragedy, which will, so to speak, break the man or the woman in pieces, and humble and crush to the very earth. That tragedy may be voluntary, the death of the old man, the immolation, the sacrifice of him upon the cross. If we are not willing thus to yield ourselves, God in His infinite love for us shatters our idol, dissipates our hopes, permits sickness, perhaps death, perhaps utter discouragement and defeat, to fall upon us or our households. Financial and business trouble may come. He may permit us to fall into open, disgraceful sin. What we shall get out of the awful lesson depends upon how we take the trouble, and to whom we go for succor,—whether we try to patch over the holes of our pride, hide it from us, drown it in drink or pleasure, or whether we take it to God in all its fulness and sinfulness, and let Him heal the wounds, and bind up the broken heart, and fill with His own presence the vacancy sorrow has made. Christ is the great Stone upon which we can fall and be broken, and out of that brokenness find healing; or we may go on until the great judgment time comes, and we will find that the Stone itself will grind us to powder which will be blown away into utter nothingness. He longs that we shall yield ourselves to the breaking, to the death of the old man. He will make us a better man or woman, if we will but learn the lesson of our own utter nothingness, and His own infinite fulness, which awaits our simple faith.