Healing Leaves Sermons Author:John Henry Smith General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1875 Subjects: Sermons, English History / General Religion / Christianity / Anglican Religion / Sermons / Christian Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Boo... more »ks edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: PRAYER IN TROUBLE. Psaxm Ixxxvi. 7. " In the day of my trouble I will call upon Thee, for Thou wilt answer me." MAN, said the suffering Patriarch, as he sat bemoaning himself in the ashes, "man is born jobv.7. unfo trouble, as the sparks fly upward:" and the sentiment, though the melancholy utterance of a mind distempered with affliction, is yet verified by universal experience. Our condition here is a condition of trouble, and such, sooner or later, we all find it. Not, indeed, that it is all trouble, and that there is no such thing as happiness in the world ; but that the happiness is so chequered, so precarious, so deceptive; it is liable to such sudden and disastrous interruptions, and is associated with so much to harass and disturb us, that the intervals of pure enjoyment are few indeed, and far between. Look at the faces that throng our streets, and how few do you see except those of childhood and youth in which any genuine cheerfulness is visible! As years however increase, cares increase with them. Time only deepens the furrows which trouble first traces. The new connections we form in life, the new relations into which we enter, the new scenes of exertion in which we are called to engage -- of whatever pleasure they may be productive -- prove all of them new sources of trouble. We may widen the range of our enjoyment, but we at the same time enlarge the circle of our anxieties. Our roses grow upon thorns. Even in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge incre...« less