SERMON XII.
ON AFFLICTIONS.
"And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me." — Matthew xi. 6.
It is a blessing, and a rare blessing, then, not to be offended in Jesus Christ. But what was there, or what could there be in him, who is the wisdom itself, and the glory of the Father, the substantial image of all perfection, which could give subject of scandal to men? His cross, my dearest brethren, which was formerly the shame of the Jews, and is, and shall be, to the end of ages, the shame of the greatest part of Christians. But, when I say that the cross of the Saviour is the shame of the most of Christians, I mean not only the cross that he bore, I mean more especially that which we are obliged, from his example, to bear; without which, he rejects us as his disciples, and denies us any participation of that glory into which he has entered, through the cross alone.
Behold what displeases us, and what we find to complain of in our divine Saviour. We would wish, that, since he was to suffer, his sufferings had been a title, as it were, of exemption, which had merited to us the privilege of not suffering with him. Let us dispel this error, my dearest brethren: the only thing which depends on us, is that of rendering our sufferings meritorious; but to suffer, or not to suffer, is not left to our choice. Providence has so wisely dispensed the good and evil of this life, that each in his station, however happy his lot may appear, finds crosses and afflictions, which always counterbalance the pleasures of it. There is no perfect happiness on the earth; for it is not here the time of consolations, but the time of sufferance. Grandeur hath its subjections and its disquiets; obscurity, its humiliations and its scorns; the world, its cares and its caprices; retirement, its sadness and weariness; marriage, its antipathies and its frenzies; friendship, its losses or its perfidies; piety itself, its repugnances and its disgusts. In a word, by a destiny inevitable to the children of Adam, each one finds his own path strewed with brambles and thorns. The apparently happiest condition hath its secret sorrows, which empoison all its felicity. The throne is the seat of chagrins equally as the lowest place; superb palaces conceal the most cruel discontents, equally as the hut of the poor and of the humble labourer; and, lest our place of exile should become endeared to us, we always feel, in a thousand different ways, that something is yet wanting to our happiness.
Nevertheless, destined to suffer, we cannot love the sufferances; continually stricken with some affliction, we are unable to make a merit of our pains; never happy, our crosses, become necessary, cannot at least become useful to us. We are ingenious in depriving ourselves of the merit of all our sufferances. One while we
