p496 Dear C McAdam, - … They tell me you have been quite ill with people's going on, and I had seen that you were discouraged. This is all wrong; the blessed Lord is just as full of love and as faithful as ever. This was my confidence before leaving London, for there mainly it was that my spirit passed through all the evil that has been going on, though partly here too; then I trusted in the dark, and simply on Him, and that stayed my soul. Now light seems to rise up in the darkness; the actings of God are manifest, have been, I think, for some time, though a deep-rooted evil is not cleared away all at once. But the Lord is, I think, evidently at work. His means are not His result, and we sometimes stop at them, but I believe He is working and will bring all out according to what is needed. His ways are "in the sea," but always "in the sanctuary." I believe and know that the testimony given to what are called brethren, is God's testimony, and He will not give it up. They might be deprived of it, but I do not think He will even do that: He is full of goodness. I have long felt that their existence was in question, and all the talk about Philadelphia and the rest, as if they were it, a proof that they were getting Laodicean. Well, they are getting sifted - sorrowful, no doubt, but a great mercy, and it will be great good to them; they will be more serious, more humble. Even their actual state is, of the two, more hopeful than I had been as to it; but God's testimony I leave, as I always left it, with Him. But I believe He is working for good; and if the evil has to be manifested before it is healed, it is so better, though of course sorrow in passing, and God is every way merciful and we are all poor things:

But I must go to my work. … We have got on pretty well with our work, though the French is a strait waistcoat. We have done through to the end of Samuel, the Psalms, and are at Jeremiah. I have besides done alone, Isaiah, Job, Daniel, Ezra, Esther, and all the minor prophets except Malachi, and two or three verses of Zechariah, so that two-thirds are done - of course, it will be looked over, and is being done so, copied etc., by the keen eye, for detail, of W. J. L., now in Spain or Minorca for a fortnight, as he had caught us up.

April, 1879.

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