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WEAR, IS EASY, THE BURDEN I BEAR IS LIGHT. What made that yoke
easy,--that burden light? That it was the will of the Father. If a
man answer: 'Any good man who believed in a God, might say as much,
and I do not see how it can help me;' my reply is, that this man
says, COME UNTO ME, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST--asserting the power
to give perfect help to him that comes.--Does all this look far
away, my friends, and very unlike the things about us? The things
about you do not give you peace; from something different you may
hope to gain it. And do not our souls themselves fall out with their
surroundings, and cry for a nobler, better, more beautiful life?
"But some one will perhaps say: 'It is well; but were I meek and
lowly in heart as he of whom you speak, it could not touch MY
trouble: that springs not from myself, but from one I love.' I
answer, if the peace be the peace of the Son of man, it must reach
to every cause of unrest. And if thou hadst it, would it not then be
next door to thy friend? How shall he whom thou lovest receive it
the most readily--but through thee who lovest him? What if thy
faith should be the next step to his? Anyhow, if this peace be not
an all-reaching as well as a heart-filling peace; if it be not a
righteous and a lovely peace, and that in despite of all surrounding
and opposing troubles, then it is not the peace of God, for that
passeth all understanding:--so at least say they who profess to
know, and I desire to take them at their word. If thy trouble be a
trouble thy God cannot set right, then either thy God is not the
true God, or there is no true God, and the man who professed to
reveal him led the one perfect life in virtue of his faith in a
falsehood. Alas for poor men and women and their aching hearts!--If
it offend any of you that I speak of Jesus as THE MAN who professed
to reveal God, I answer, that the man I see, and he draws me as with
the strength of the adorable Truth; but if in him I should certainly
find the God for the lack of whose peace I and my brethren and
sisters pine, then were heaven itself too narrow to hold my
exultation, for in God himself alone could my joy find room.
"Come then, sore heart, and see whether his heart cannot heal thine.
He knows what sighs and tears are, and if he knew no sin in himself,
the more pitiful must it have been to him to behold the sighs and
tears that guilt wrung from the tortured hearts of his brethren and
sisters. Brothers, sisters, we MUST get rid of this misery of ours.
It is slaying us. It is turning the fair earth into a hell, and our
hearts into its fuel. There stands the man, who says he knows: take
him at his word. Go to him who says in the might of his eternal
tenderness and his human pity--COME UNTO ME, ALL YE THAT LABOUR AND
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