Sorrow is the normal state of a world that is fallen, and yet under conditions of redemption. Sorrow on earth is the root out of which can be made to grow and blossom the sweetest joys of heaven. Sorrow in man is his natural capability for the joys of the supernatural. Sorrow is a species of suffering with hope in it. Suffering with no hope in it is despair, and that is the normal condition in hell. On the other hand, joy, pure, boundless joy, without a trace of sorrow, is the normal state in heaven. In the true sense of the word, sorrow is preeminently a thing belonging to this world, because it occupies a middle ground between the hopeless anguish and hatred in hell and the bliss of heaven. Hell is a starless night, and heaven an endless, cloudless noon; but sorrow is a night into which is sifted the silvery light of moon and stars. Sorrow is the pathetic poetry of a fallen world in which hope still lingers. The heavenly life on earth is tinctured all through with many kinds of sorrow. When Scripture says that "sorrow is better than mirth," it is with special reference to life in this world, and not to the life in heaven. There is nothing on earth that is not in some way related to sorrow, or hedged in by it, or that does not partake of its color and tone. We are redeemed by sorrow. Our Savior, in pouring out His precious blood for our everlasting salvation, said, am exceeding sorrowful, even unto death."' Repentance is made up of many kinds of sorrow. The consecration of the believer is steeped in holy sorrow. Almost all prayer is saturated with various kinds of sorrow. The power of music depends on the sorrow there is in it. The poetry of the great masters, that holds our intellects spell-bound, derives its mighty magic from the sad strains of sorrow that run all through it. It is the sorrow element in everything that seizes and holds the hearts of mankind beyond any other influence. It is sorrow that immortalizes battlefields, and monuments, and tombs, and great heroes, and martyrs. It is the sorrow piled up in the Wesminster Abbey that draws thousands annually to walk through its halls with silent, uncovered heads. It is the sorrow in the Bible that makes it the most natural as well as the most divine book on earth; and kings, philosophers, young men and maidens, beggars and lonely savages in the forest, are more deeply touched with the pathetic lives of the dear old weeping patriarchs than with the shallow, heartless noise of mere fleshly events. Sorrow is the universal language of earth, and more easily understood by human hearts than any other one thing. It is the background of all our brightest joys. The Holy Ghost does not prohibit this element of our nature, but bids us to sorrow not as those who have no hope." Though sorrow may have an Ethiopian complexion, yet, like the eunuch under Queen Candace, it is a thing of great authority, and has charge of the golden treasures of knowledge and wisdom and everlasting life (Acts 8:27). When sorrow comes under the power of divine grace' it works out a manifold ministry in our lives.

1. It is the ministry of sorrow to break down hard natures, and melt stubborn wills. There are men who have plenty of mind, and capacity to see truth, to sanction righteousness, but whose heart-nature seems made of flint. They lack feeling, warmth, tenderness. They look upon religion as a cold morality, or a set of business-like duties, or as a financial and political transaction with God. They look upon religious emotion as weak and womanish, and if they are church members, and make any pretense to religion, they are more like baptized mules than little children with their Heavenly Father. God takes His time, and watches His opportunity, and slowly undermines these tough natures, till some day an uneasy feeling comes up from the fountain of their being and creeps all through them. Calamity takes hold upon them. God allows most bitter disappointment to crush some darling hope, or plan. Clouds gather; misunderstandings, separations, sharp and sudden turns in the intellectual or financial or social life transpire; or health breaks down, or bereavement turns life into a walking cemetery. Then sorrow gets in its beautiful work, and fairly laughs behind its mask of tears at the work it will do. As in the late afternoon, the shadows of the great, rugged mountains stretch themselves across the low valley, as if the proud mountain peaks had knelt down to pray on the dewy meadow in the evening hour, while the stars of evening begin to light their lamps, as if to make a sanctuary of the spot; so it often happens that sorrow is an afternoon gospel on many a stubborn soul, and gets many a proud heart to bow down in the valley of tears.

2. Sorrow weans us more effectually than anything else from many things that prevent our perfect attachment to 'God and heaven. We are not only all of us children, but we are always children, and always taking on new kinds of childhood. When we drop one form of childhood, we simply take on another kind, or another degree of childhood, on a different scale of life. Children cry for toys, and men have shed tears for failing to get the White House, and Generals have wept aloud on battle fields for not being allowed certain positions of honor, and great doctors of divinity have cried like whipped babies when they failed to get some ecclesiastical toy. No nurse on earth can wean the soul from its old loves, its ambitions, its own good works, its manifold entanglements, like dear, old, dusky sorrow. As mothers pour sweet balm over the chafed limbs of their little children, so sorrow puts a quietness into restless characters, stills the noise, soothes the pain, and works such a revolution that the soul is perfectly content to lose everything and relinquish, let go, give up, and turn away from its dearest idols, its fondest dreams, its strongest ambitions, with a tranquil indifference that is in itself really sweeter than if all its old desires had been gratified. Sorrow over their failures has brought more peace than they would have had if successful. Sorrow is the great power of disenchantment. It takes the veneering from what we thought was solid mahogany. It pulls off the cheap paper that we thought was some great master's frescoe. It unties strong cords that seemed to defy every other power.

3. Sorrow widens the soul. Nobody ever suspects the little' mean narrowness in his heart till God's flint hammers have broken him all to pieces, and scattered the fragments over the great fields of time and providence. Human biography is filled with instances which show that the men and the women of great, world-wide hearts have been those who were the children of deep sorrow. Proud royalists dug up the bones of Cromwell and burned them, and scattered the ashes upon the winds of heaven. They acted in blind hate, but God saw that the grave was too small to contain such bones, and from that on, the spirit of civil liberty has been spreading, as if all mankind had sucked into their lungs a portion of the ashes of Cromwell's bones, which were tossed to the universal winds. This is the ministry of sorrow. It lifts the soul out of geographical lines and sectarian walls, and contemptible caste, and bitter racial prejudices, or little, narrow religious cliques, and makes it a citizen of heaven, a universal lover and friend of all mankind, and a princely heir of the ages to come. There is among some narrow Christians a water baptism which pens one up to what is called "close communion." The soul that God chooses to be baptized into sorrow is made a thousand worlds too large for such earthly littleness. Joseph had more sorrow than all the sons of Jacob, and it led him out into a ministry of bread for all nation. For this reason, the Holy Spirit said of Joseph, "He was a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches ran over the wall" (Gen. 49:22). It was through sorrow his heart grew big enough to run over the Jewish wall' and feed the Gentiles with bread; and now Gentile Christians need a baptism that will lead them over the church walls to love and feed the scattered children of Israel. Sorrow is the Mary that breaks the alabaster boxes of our hearts and lives' in order that the costly perfume may fill the entire house, instead of being pent up. God never uses anybody to a large degree, until after He breaks them all to pieces.

4. Sorrow reveals unknown depths in the soul, and unknown capabilities of experience and service. Gay, trifling people are always shallow, and never suspect the little meannesses in their nature. Sorrow is God's plowshare that turns up and subsoils the depths of the soul, that it may yield richer harvests. If we had never fallen, or were in a glorified state, then the strong torrents of divine joy would be the normal force to open up all our souks capacities; but being in a fallen world, sorrow, with despair taken out of it, is the chosen power to reveal ourselves to ourselves. Hence it is sorrow that makes us think deeply, long and soberly. Sorrow makes us go slower and more considerately, and introspect our motives and dispositions. It is sorrow that opens up within us the capacities of and it is sorrow that makes us willing to launch our capacities on a boundless sea of service for God and our fellows. We may suppose a class of indolent people living at the base of a great mountain range, who have never ventured to explore the valleys and canyons back in the mountains, and some day, when a great thunder-storm goes careering through the mountains, it turns the hidden glens into echoing trumpets, and reveals the inner recesses of the valleys, like the convolutions of a monster shell, and then the dwellers at the foot of the hills are astonished at the labyrinths and unexplored recesses of a region so near by, and yet so little known. So it is with many souls who indolently live on the outer edge of their own natures until great thunder-storms of sorrow reveal hidden depths within that were never hitherto suspected.

5. It is through sorrow the soul learns obedience. Scripture tells us that even Jesus "learned obedience by the things which He suffered." Many have stumbled over this Scripture. Jesus had in Him the principle of perfect obedience from His birth, and He never once disobeyed the Father in thought, word, or act. But that perfect spirit of obedience had to be brought out and unfolded in a thousand various applications and directions, and under all sorts of human limitations and vicissitudes among those who constituted the world's sinful society. Now, in the carrying out of His perfect obedience there were circumstances painful and sorrowful, and through suffering He learned the importance, the true value, and the best way of obedience. In a similar way, the true child of God finds out through sorrow the very deepest and most loving obedience. It is sorrow that brings the soul into the Calvary-life of Jesus, and introduces it into the priestly life of Christ, that of compassion and sympathy and prayer for others. As the mordant fixes the colors in a dye, so sorrow gives fixedness, perseverance, to the spirit of obedience.

6. But sorrow will pass away. It ministers now in the heavenly life' but its ministry will pass away when the curse is lifted from the earth, and the age of glory succeeds to the age of grace. It is in the day when the saints of God shall be gathered at Mount Zion, With songs and everlasting joy upon their heads, that all sorrow and sighing shall flee away." It is when the Lamb is to gather His redeemed ones in the New Jerusalem, and "lead them by fountains of living waters' that God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." Sorrow is the pathetic moonlight that in the present dispensation ministers to grace, and brings forth some delicate flowers, that are not strong enough at first to bear the hot sunlight of supernal joy.