June 15

Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.—Ps. xxxiv, 19.

He who hath never warred with misery,

Nor ever tugged with fortune and distress,

Hath had n'occasion, nor no field to try

The strength and forces of his worthiness;

Those parts of judgment which felicity

Keeps as concealed, affliction must express.

And men show only their abilities,

And what they are in their extremities.

SAMUEL DANIEL.

Consider that afflictions are oftentimes the occasions of temporal advantages; and we must not look upon them as they sit down heavily upon us, but as they serve some of God's ends and the purposes of universal providence. And when a prince fights justly, and yet unprosperously, if he could see all those reasons for which God hath so ordered it, he would think it the most reasonable thing in the world, and that it would be very ill to have it otherwise. If a man could have opened one of the pages of the Divine counsel, and could have seen the event of Joseph's being sold to the merchants of Midian, he might, with much reason, have dried up the young man's tears: and when God's purposes are opened in the event of things, as it was in the case of Joseph when he sustained his father's family and became lord of Egypt, then we see what ill judgment we made of things, and that we were passionate as children and transported with sense and mistaken interest.

BISHOP JEREMY TAYLOR.