cottage turns over the dead page, missing the comment of imploring gesture, and kindling eye, and earnest tones, which doubtless pierced and fired the audience of Paul!

To individual faithfulness then, to the energy of the private conscience, has God committed the real history and progress of mankind. In the scenes wherein we daily move, from capacities common to us all, do drop the seeds from which, if ever, the Paradise of God must grow and blossom upon the earth. He that can be true to his best and secret nature, that can, by faith and patience, conquer the struggling world within, is most likely to send forth a blessed power to vanquish the world without. Mysteries of influence fall from every earnest volition, to return to us, in gladness or in weeping, after many days. No insult can we pass upon the divine but gentle dignity of duty, no quenching of God's spirit can we allow, that will not prepare a curse for others as well as for ourselves: nor any reverence, prompt and due, in act as in thought, can we pay to the God within, that will not yield abundant blessing. 'See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise.'

XI.

THE CONTENTMENT OF SORROW.

ISAIAH LIII. 10.

YET IT PLEASED THE LORD TO BRUISE HIM; HE HATH PUT HIM TO GRIEF.

FROM age to age mankind have importunately sought for the reasons of sorrow; and from age to age have returned from the quest unsatisfied; for still is the question constantly renewed. How could it be otherwise? As sickness entered house after house, and waste made havoc on generation after generation, it was inevitable that our terrified hearts, ever clinging to that which must be wrenched away, and warmed by that which must be stricken by the frosts of death in our embrace, should cry, O! why these cruel messages of separation, these decrees of exile thrown amid groups of friends and kindred? But the angel of destruction makes no reply: silently he executes his mission: only he relents not; and whether he be met by tears

and prayers, or by frowns and the deplorable, affectation of defiance, he does his sacred bidding, and passes on. It would seem that our passionate curiosity, which continues to urge its 'why?' is never to be satisfied; but still to hand down its question as the eternal and unanswered cry of the human race. And however impatient some minds may feel at our helpless struggles with this difficulty, the thoughtful will acquiesce in them tranquilly. For they know that it is of such unsolved problems, of such mental strife with the mysterious, which uses up our knowledge, and lets us fall upon our conscious ignorance, that religion has its birth; and that the perpetual renewal of this great controversy maintains the soul in that intermediate position between the known and the incomprehensible, the finite and the infinite, which excludes as well the dogmatism of certainty as the apathy of nescience and chance, and calls up that wonder, reverence, and trust, which are the fitting attributes of our nature. There is a sense in which the maxim has a profound truth, that 'ignorance is the mother of devotion;'-a sense however by no means justifying the continuance of any ignorance which can be removed, or can degrade one human being below another; but tending to reconcile us to such as may be rendered inevitable by the limits assigned to our faculties. If men

knew every thing, they would venerate nothing: reverence is not the affection with which objects of knowledge, as such, are regarded; and to place any object of thought under the eye of religious contemplation, it must be stationed above the region of distinct perception, in the shadows of that Infinitude which sleeps so awfully around the luminous boundaries of our knowledge. In this position is the great question respecting the amount of evil in human life; near the highest summit of our knowledge, and the deepest root of our religion.

To the demand of the human heart for less suffering and a more liberal dispensation of happiness, no answer, as from God, can be discovered in scripture or in philosophy; and all attempts to assign his reasons for the present adjustments of the world in this respect, have, I believe, signally failed. But it is otherwise when we attempt an answer, as from ourselves; when instead of taking for granted that the demand is just, and waiting till it obtains its reply from without, we look into the demand itself, and ask whether it is wise and right; whether it comes from a condition of the understanding and the heart desirable and excellent, or disordered and ignoble. Paradox as it may seem, it is, I conceive, still true, that the state of mind which urges the question