p497 [E L Bevir] DEAREST BROTHER, - I was as ever, glad to hear of you and your work. Our work goes on, thank God, steadily and over four-fifths is done. I have felt the pressure of what is going on in England, while at this work, but have been able to look up: what a blessing! God is working there, but I fear a good many will fall in the sifting, and the thoughts and state of heart be revealed. However, there is always a divine way for him who waits on God - cannot but be - and wilderness where there is no way, gives in grace His way and nothing else, and that is a great mercy; but it is very painful when many you have walked with turn out unfaithful. It is a sad world! It makes heaven sweeter because there is not, and cannot be, any evil in that which will be around one. But Christ, as manifested here, was good in the midst of evil: that we shall have only in memory in heaven; only He who is it, the Manna of the desert, will be kept up for Canaan's knowledge and joy. He is it now in spirit. Faithfulness is known where faithfulness is needed. It is in darkness down here that light rises up for the righteous. What so dark as Christ's death? Yet all depends on it even for Him as Man. I see frequently in the New Testament it is when He sees the power of evil, and bows, that all the prospects of His glory open upon Him.

I have some hope of getting, in about a month or so, to Ardèche and up the mountains, but as all is in God's hands and will, so it depends on the progress we make in translating, partly on their haymaking being over (here all is unusually late), and partly on an old man's strength. …

Pau, April.

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