December 30

"And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten."

—JOBL ii. 25.

THE year looks sad enough in the retrospect. The sin of it, against my own soul, against my nearest and dearest, against the Church of Jesus, against the world lying in the Evil One; the poverty of it, for far and near how broken is the verdure of my fields; the frequent sorrow of it, the reproach of famine, the dearth—indeed, I blush when I recall it all.

But what does God say? I will restore the year that the locust hath eaten. If He cannot obliterate, He will forgive. If He cannot undo the past, He will teach me by it a humble self-distrust and a clinging faith and an earnest diligence. Innocence is impossible to me, but penitence is not impossible—penitence and those noble fruits which spring from it.

One of the briefest and sweetest books in the New Testament, as Joel is brief and sweet in the Old, is the Epistle to Philemon, the Epistle which tells the story of Onesimus, the runaway slave.

"Paul layeth himself out for Onesimus, and so setteth himself as if he were Onesimus and had done Philemon wrong. As Christ does for us with God the Father, so doth St. Paul with Philemon for Onesimus. We are all God's Onesimi, to my thinking."

And to mine, Doctor Luther. Fugitives, outcasts, who have stolen our Master's property and fled from His house, aforetime unprofitable to Him. Ah, but God's Onesimi too, because He welcomes us back, and then at last we begin to be profitable; not now slaves, but children beloved.

My scarlet sins He makes as white as snow.