March 18

"The form of the Fourth is like the Son of God."—Daniel 3:25.

THAT mystic and blessed Fourth—in all my affliction He is afflicted. There is no fire so fierce that He will not bear the heat and glow by my side.

Very thankful I should be that, when science magnifies physical power and tells me that only the fittest survive, and when literature despises the uncultured crowd, I have a Saviour touched with the feeling of my infirmities. I can sing with William Blake—

"Under every grief and pine Runs a joy with silken twine."

The furnace may be one of sickness; and, if Jesus were never sick Himself, He passed through bodily pains such as I cannot know and cannot conceive. Or it may be a furnace of poverty; and He was so poor that He had not where to lay His head. Or it may be the fiery trial of temptation; and He was tempted in all points like as I am. Or, perhaps, it is the sorrow of misapprehension by others; and they called Him a Samaritan, and a gluttonous man, and the ally of the prince of the devils. Or it is the deeper and awfuller grief of spiritual desolation; and out in the loneliness and shame He cried, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? Stretched on the rack, where they were torturing him pitilessly, one of the martyrs saw, with cleansed and opened eyes, a Young Man by his side—not yet fifty years old—who kept wiping the beads of sweat from his brow.

So He understands; He sympathises; He knows. And He has power—all power in heaven and on earth—to rescue and deliver. When the fire is fiercest He is there.