Take Away Our Misery

“Hear me! To Thee my soul in suppliance turneth,
Like the lorn pilgrim on the sands accursed;
For life’s sweet waters, God! my spirit yearneth —
Give me to drink! I perish here of thirst!” —Mary E. Hewitt

“There is an exciting element of this hunger and thirst after righteousness, or, what leads man to hunger and thirst after righteousness, a deep sense of guilt. Man feels he is miserable; he knows, and needs not to be told, that he is sinful, and he is therefore unhappy. His heart makes him feel he is miserable; his conscience tells him he is guilty; and his want of happiness and want of holiness together make him hunger and thirst for something that will expiate the one, and allay the pangs and sorrows of the other. He soon discovers that, to take away his misery, there must be taken away his sin. This is a great and precious discovery. It is the dawn of glory. We begin to find out that sin is the bitter root,—that all the aches and miseries that flesh is heir to are only the apples of Sodom that grow upon this inveterate root. We discover that sin is as sound, and unhappiness the echo, the prolific parent; and ills, and aches, and storms, and disquiet, the progeny that spring from it. We come to discover, partly by nature, chiefly by grace, that the misery which corrodes the heart never can be removed except by the expiation of the sin which cramps and fevers the conscience.”

An excerpt from:  John Cumming, Benedictions; or, The Blessed Life, (Boston: John P. Jewett & Company, 1854), 88.