Surely God punishes me,
to correct me, and make me better. I punish my child, because I
love him, and wish him good. God punishes me because he loves me
and desires that I may be a partaker of his holiness.
And as soon as that blessed thought had risen up in any man's mind,
by the inspiration of God's Holy Spirit, all the world would begin
to look bright and clear and full of hope. This earth, with all its
sorrows and sufferings, would look no longer to him as God's prison
house, where poor sinners sat tortured and wailing, fast bound in
misery and iron, till they should pay the uttermost farthing, which
they never could pay. No. It would look to him as God's school-
house, God's reformatory, in which he is training and chastening and
correcting the souls of men, that he may deliver them from the ruin
and misery which sin brings on them, both the original sin which is
born in them and the actual sin which they commit. Then God appears
to him a gracious and merciful father. He can see a blessed meaning
and a wholesome use in all human suffering; and he can break out, as
the Psalmist does in this glorious psalm, into praise and
thanksgiving, and call on mankind to give thanks to the Lord; for he
is gracious, and his mercy endureth for ever.
In every kind of human suffering, I say, he sees now a meaning and a
use.
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