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the evil that remains to be lamented, why contemplate the evil most; it will subtract from your happiness, but if it really makes you more useful, more self-denying, more "meet for the inheritance of the saints in light," the gain will exceed the loss. But I do not think that such will be the effect. No morbid feeling of any kind can produce vigorous exertion. Fiction may represent the union of benevolence and diseased sensibility, but real life never witnessed it. The persons who in deed and in truth do benefit the world by their labour, who here remove a weed, and there plant a flower, are, and must be cheerful; must, and will take happy views of life and its contingencies. As Christians they see, and mourn, and admit its evils; but then every moment spent in mere feeling, every sigh and every tear that does not issue in exertion, they regard as wasted. They know that the world is a wilderness, and that nothing but the hand of God himself, will ever change it into a fruitful field; but they know too, that in measure and in degree he will bless human

efforts for its improvement; therefore, they go on and take courage. This " patient continuance in well doing" has, independent of the "glory, honour, and immortality," attached to it by the apostle, a present and consentaneous reward. I do not speak of success, that, may frequently be delayed, but of the hidden, healthy happiness which they habitually experience, and which, if in one view, the effect of their active benevolence, is in another, its cause. I am sure, if you will think over all the Christians you know, or have read of, you will be constrained to say, the happiest and the most heavenly-minded, are the most active; nay, I will go further, and say, that their thoughts of heaven, if less speculative, and perhaps less vivid, are also less selfish. They realize it as a place of repose; but if God may be honoured, and man benefited, they are willing to bear the heat and burden of a long life before they "rest from their labours." They think of something more than how to get to heaven as fast, and with as little trouble as possible. They would not bury their talent any more

than they would waste it. The hope of heaven, and the prospect of its joys, do not render them discontented with their preparatory state of existence; do not disqualify them for life; do not diminish but increase its enjoyments. The expectation of being one day angels, does not make them angry that they must first be men.

My love, ask yourself whether your present deep disgust at the trivialities which require, you say, the mass of time and thought, rendering the soul the drudge of the body, and time paramount to eternity; ask yourself whether your deep disgust at this state of things does not comprise a little pride, and a little romance. You wish mankind to be wholly and indiscriminately creatures of pure intellect, and pure sensibility; you want life to be a golden age revived, and the world an untroubled, unoccupied Eden; you would have spiritual contemplation form the sole business of existence, and refined and imaginative intercourse its chief pleasure: you want heaven now. But my dearest

this is aiming to be wiser, kinder, and

purer than God; and if it arises, as I said before, from a partial apprehension of one truth-man's sinfulness; it arises also from total forgetfulness of another-that man on earth is merely in a state of discipline. He is a child at school; an heir, that "is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father." He is like seed, sown here in corruption, that by that very process he may hereafter be "raised in incorruption;" he is sown in dishonour that he may be raised in glory; sown in weakness that he may be raised in power. And who has encompassed him with infirmities, and obliged him to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow? Who has said, "Six days shalt thou labour," as imperatively as, "the seventh day thou shalt do no manner of work?"—Even that omniscient Being, that King eternal, immortal, invisible, that only wise God, who, when man had made himself a sinner, and therefore unfit for an existence purely spiritual, knew best how to bring good out of evil; how, from the fragments of a shattered fabric, to erect one more lasting; to create a new world out of the

wreck and chaos of an old one! Punishment there undoubtedly is, in the dispensation which makes labour and sorrow the heritage of man, wheresoever, and howsoever found. Grief we must inevitably feel to think of what this world was made to be, what yet it contains materials for being, and what, alas! it is. But joy, and praise, and thanksgiving ought to predominate in every heart, and will do so, wherever the relative situations and respective characters of God and man, are properly appreciated. What, has the creature marred a work which its infinite Creator pronounced "very good ;" and has that Creator restored somewhat of its beauty, suffered it to retain any of its blessings, and promised finally to remove altogether the curse that hangs over it; and is the creature justified in rebellious murmurings and vain imaginations? 'Why doth a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins?" Banish, my dear, all Utopian dreams; and henceforth when you contemplate the course of life, wonder at the wisdom, and adore the goodness, which suffers its harassing cares, its

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