God is nearer to you when sorrow comes upon you: God is laying His grave, loving, fatherly hand upon your heads when He sends you pain, disappointment, bereavement. He is calling you to turn to Him, and see the brightness which He is preparing for you, and which never shines with such pure and winning light as when you see it through the cloud of sorrow. And the very voice and sound of sorrow, what is it else than a voice from the next world,—the world, to the Christian, of joy? Amid the lively, confusing sounds, the busy, bustling noise which surrounds us here when we are well, and our friends are well, when all is going on prosperously round us, and our hearts respond in mirth and comfort to such things, the voice of sorrow, sorrow from without, is nothing else than the very voice of the next world.

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