Connecticut western news., 1891-07-09
they rush miles a minute.


 of Dr. James Hutton and Saussure and other scientists, there is an infinite mys- tery about the rain. There is an ocean of the unfathomable in every raindrop, and God says today as he said in the time of Job, If you cannot under stand one drop of rain, do not be sur prised if my dealings with you are in applicable" Why does that aged man, decrepit, beggared, vicious, sick of the world, and the world sick of him, live on, while here is a man in midlife, con- secrated to God, hard working, useful in every respect, who dies2
 Why does that old gossip, gadding along the street about everybody's business but her own, have such good health, while the Christian mother, with a flock of little ones about her whom she is preparing for usefulness and for heaven-the mother who you think could not be spared an hour from that household does she lie down and die with cancer9 Why does that man, selfish to the core, go on adding fortune to fortune, consuming every thing on himself, continue to prosper, while that man who has been giving ten per cent. of all his income to God and the church goes into bankruptcy9
 Before we make stark fools of our selves let us stop pressing this everast- ing "why." Let us worship where we cannot understand. Let man take that one question, "Why2" and follow it far enough, and push it, and he will land in wretchedness and perdition. We want in our theology fewer inter rogation marks and more exclamation points Heaven is the place for expla nation. Earth is the place for trust If you cannot understand so minute a thing as a raindrop, how can you ex- pect to understand Gods dealings9 Hath the rain father2" .'.
 JUDGE NOT BY FEEBLE SENSE.
 Again, my text makes me think that the rain of tears is of divine origin. Great clouds of trouble sometimes hover over us. They are black, and they are gorged, and they are thunder ous They are more portentous than Salvador or Claude ever painted clouds of poverty or persecution or be- reavement They hover over us, and get darker and blacker, and after a while tear starts, and we think by an extra pressure of the eyelid to stop it. Others follow, and after while there is a shower of fearful emotion. Yea, there is rain of tears. "Hath that rain a fathers"
 "Oh," you say. "a tear is nothing but a drop of limpid fluid secreted by the lachrymal gland-is only @ sign of weak eyes," Great mistake. It is one of the Lords richest benedictions to the world. There are people in Blackwell's Island insane asylum, and at Utica, and at all the asylums of this land, who were de- mented by the fact that they could not cry at the right time. Said maniac in one of our public institutions, under a Gospel sermon that started the tears |: 'sDo you see that tear2 That is the first have wept for twelve years. Ithink it will help my brain"
 There are 8 great many in the grave who could not stand any longer under the glacier of trouble. If that glacier had only melted into weeping they could have endured it. There have been times in your life when you would have given the world, if you had pos sessed it, for one tear. You could shriek, you could blaspheme, but you could not cry. Have you never seen man holding the hand of dead wife, who had been all the world to him2 The temples ivid with excitement, the eye dry and frantic, no moisture on the upper or lower lid. You saw there were bolts of anger in the cloud but no rain.
 To your Christian comfort he said, Don't talk me about God; there is no God; or if there is hate him; don't talk to me about God; would he have left me and these motherless childrenW But few hours or days after, coming across some lead pencil that she owned in life, or some letters which she wrote when he was away from home, with an outcry that appals there bursts the fountain of tears, and as the sunlight of Gods consolation strikes that foun- tain of tears you find out that it is a tender hearted, merciful, pitiful and all compassionate God who was the father of that rain.
 "Oh," you say, ''it's absurd to think that God is going to watch over tears" No, my friends. There are three or four kinds of them that God counts, bottles and eternizes. First, there are all parental tears and there are more of these than of any other kind, because the most of the race die in infancy, and that keeps parents mourning all around the world. They never get over it. They may live to shout and sing after ward, but there is always corridor in the soul that is silent, though it once resounded.
 My parents never mentioned the death of child who died fifty years before without tremor in the voice and sigh, oh! how deep fetched. It was better she should die; it was mercy she should die. She would have been lifelong invalid. But you cannot argue away a parents grief. How often you hear the moan, "Oh! my child, my childl" Then there are the filial tears.
 OUR GRIEF FOR THE DEAD.
 Little children soon get over the loss of parents. They are easily diverted with a new toy. But where is the man who has come to thirty or forty or fifty years of age who can think of the old people without having all the foun- tains of his soul stirred up9 You may have had to take care of her a good many years, but you never can forget how she used to take care of you.