benefit. Make the bible your manual of devotion. Pray over it, and pray in its words: it is your spiritual meat, your directory, your armour on the right hand and on the left, your lamp, your balm when wounded, your restorative when weary, your standard against the enemy, your "tree of the knowledge of good and evil," and your tree of life also, the leaf whereof shall not wither, neither shall the fruit fall.

I have not written to you as I wished, but I am not now equal to writing more. Assure yourself of my sincere regard, and with an earnest desire that God may lead, and keep, and instruct you; that he may enable you to be a faithful witness of his grace here, and a partaker of his glory in heaven, believe me, dear

Faithfully yours.

LETTER XXI.

MY DEAR

I AM glad that you spend your birth-day with us, that I may have this opportunity of assuring you that I earnestly desire for you the continuance and increase of "every good and perfect gift," the best blessings of this life, and the fulness of that which is to come. Perhaps, a year ago, I had coveted for my friends, gifts far different from those I covet for them now; for life now wears another aspect, and there is a sense in which I regard my friends with another love. Life is still a race, but I perceive that neither the goal nor the crown belong to this world, and that in this world, it is therefore in vain

to seek them. My love for my friends still leads me to wish their temporal honour, comfort, and happiness, but only in that way and in that degree, which will not interfere with their running "the race set before them." I do, however, wish you many a sunny day, many a pleasant bower, and many a peaceful rest, to beguile your pilgrimage through this world of thorns and briars. The Israelites had their Elim, a place of palm trees and of wells, to comfort them after their Marah, the fountain of bitter water. May the same kind and gracious providence watch over you, appoint your lot, temper your sorrows, enhance your comforts, be to you as rivers in a dry place, the shadow of a rock in a weary land. And may he so guide, so teach, so chasten, and so support you through life, that after death he may receive you into a "mansion not made with hands, eternal in the heavens;" give you the crown which cannot fade, and the garment which never grows old, his presence which is life, and his favour which is fulness of joy for evermore. Your present birth-day

occurs on a Sabbath; but it is an earthly, it is an alloyed sabbath. That of heaven will be one, ever bright and never ending: thither may we both aspire, and then thither shall we attain! "God," says St. Augustine, “is patient because eternal;" and who can look back upon his past life, be that life long or short, and not blushingly acknowledge the truth of the assertion; and not tremble also at another observation of an old divine, that "God is indeed patient, but of every day and hour of such patience he keeps an exact account."

My dear friend, writing as I do under solemn impressions of those realities, those only realities-God, Death, the Soul, and Judgment, I cannot-dare not but be faithful! The measure of religion that satisfies in health, will not support in sickness, still less upon a death-bed. When the soul feels itself naked in the presence of God-apprehended as God the judge of all, sitting on his throne, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, doing as he will among the armies of heaven, attended by ten thousand times ten thousand minis

tering spirits-God, fearful in justice, glorious in holiness, in whose eyes the very heavens are not clean, oh! what can vague, dim views and hopes avail? Insufficient, even to a sense of anguish, then, are remembrances of moral effort, good desires, and devotional exercises; they cannot satisfy, they cannot calm the awakened mind. But if the sufferer turns to those oracles that cannot lie, and reads therein, "If any man sin we have an advocate with the Father, even Jesus Christ the righteous," then may he say, "though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." It is astonishing too, how little we care for intellectual things in seasons of sorrow and sickness; to use the scriptural phrase, they wither as the green herb:" divine truths, on the contrary, are like the trees in the prophet's vision, "their leaves do not fade, neither is the fruit thereof consumed;" they are a healing balsam for the wounded heart, a restoring medicine for the sinking spirit. The brightest flashes of wit, the loftiest flights of imagination, the subtlest exercises

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