best ends, so uniform was her faithfulness. Long was she stricken with a fearful disease before she ever made it known. And then O what sufferings did she endure! Month after month of anguish was her lot, till it became year after year. Yet she murmured not. A smile of heavenly sweetness beamed through the manifest agony she was enduring, like a sunbeam stealing through the storm-agitated clouds; and when nature was too weak to repress the groan, the struggling effort to repress it was confessed by those near. What were the sufferings of a Socrates compared with hers! But during the years of severe pain, her child-like confidence in God was never shaken. Her language, in times of severe anguish, was-"I know not why I should suffer so, but it is my Heavenly Father's will, and that comforts me." Often, often she would remark, that the faith and trust that God had a good design in causing her to suffer, was her sweetest solace. Take that away, and despair would ensue. Meek-hearted saint! thou art free from struggling, and thy last prayer is answered-" I must go home-O let me go!"

This view of pain and suffering is the one best suited to the human mind. It permits us to connect the idea of a design of the Infinite Spirit with all pain and suffering. That design, thou, nor I, reader, cannot always fathom, or trace out in the least, yet I am willing and my reason tells me it is just to confide in the goodness thereof. What else can satisfy? What else can comfort? Let me feel there is a benevolent design of an Infinite Mind in all pain, and I can pray for patience to bear what comes.

Very justly has the author we have referred to remarked in regard to mistrust of God's goodness because of sufferings,-God's goodness "needs no advocate. It will take care of itself. In spite of clouds, men, who have eyes, believe in the sun, and none but the blind can question the Creator's goodness. Suffering has little to do towards creating a settled scepticism. The most sceptical men, the most insensible to God's goodness, the most prone to murmur, may be found among those who are laden above all others with the goods of life, whose cup overflows with prosperity, and who, by an abuse of prosperity, have become selfish, exacting, and all alive to inconveniences and privations. These are the cold-hearted and doubting. If I were to seek those, whose conviction of God's goodness is faintest and most easily disturbed, I should seek them in the palace sooner than in the hovel. I would go to the luxurious table, to the pillow of ease, to those among us who abound most to the self-exalting, self-worshipping, not to the depressed and forsaken. The profoundest sense of God's goodness, which it has been my privilege to witness, I have seen in the countenance, and heard from the lips of the suffering. I have found none to lean on God with such filial trust, as those whom he afflicted. I doubt indeed if true gratitude and true confidence ever spring up in the human soul, until it has suffered. A superficial, sentimental recognition of God's goodness may indeed be found among those who have only lived to enjoy. But deep, strong, earnest piety strikes root in the soil which has been broken and softened by calamity. Such, I be

lieve, is the observation of every man who has watched the progress of human character; and therefore I say that I fear very little the influence of suffering in producing scepticism. Still, virtuous minds are sometimes visited with perplexities, with painful surprise; and in seasons of peculiar calamity, the question is asked with reverence and still with anxiety, how it is that so much suffering is experienced under a being of perfect goodness; and such passing clouds are apt to darken us in earlier life, and in the earlier stages of christian character. On this account it is right to seek and communicate such explanations as may be granted us of the ways of God."

We may seek relief from many oppressive feelings by calmly surveying the real good of life-in estimating the sources of happiness, of pleasant emotion, thought, and feeling, and in remembering that beyond this life our highest and purest hopes shall become realized. Happiness is not but another name for dreams. We have known real enjoyment. We err often in our estimation of life's happiness, by fixing our attention upon only the uncommon, to the neglect of the every day enjoyments. "The happiness of life," said Coleridge, "is made up of minute fractions-the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss, a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of playful raillery, and the countless other infinitesimals of pleasurable thought and genial feeling." These minute fractions we too seldom make account of, and are too often as would be the gardener who should make no account of the summer dews, that, silently and unperceived, add life and vigor to his plants, and

be only thankful for the generous rains. The pleasures arising from the kind look, the cordial grasp and pressure of the hand, the casual meeting, the delightful smile, the jest, the anecdote, the song, the intellectual treat, the humble deed of charity, and the ten thousand other sources of little joys, make up the greater part of our sum of enjoyment. What a sum are the pleasurable sensations of gratified taste and appetite! What a sum springing from the very consciousness of life-the spontaneous feeling of joy that we are alive, as we break from the power of sleep-that we can see the light, hear the voices of human beings, and the hum of a moving world. Add to these the pleasure springing from the conscious ness of possessing active powers-physical, intellectual, moral, and religious. What a theme is the circle of enjoyments peculiar to the exercise of each class! What a reflection to lift the heart in joy is in the thought that we are creatures of Progress! Progress! what thrilling ideas possess the reflecting mind at the sound of that word-rushing in like the sudden burst of the sun's light at day-break, filling the world with glory! We feel that it is a glorious thing that we have an inward power mightier than all outward-that it can speak and the world is changed.

Take the commonest words designative of the associations of life, and each will be a good text wherefrom to discourse to our own heart of the good of existence. What a clustering of joyous thoughts there is around Home, Love, Friendship, Society, Religion, Heaven, Christ, God! Vain, vain indeed the attempt to sketch an out

line of life's sources of joy. Thought turned in upon the record of human experience, can discourse the best.

Turn again to the proper view of pain and suffering, and see how they minister to the development of inward and everlasting good. We listen to the voice of him we have before heard:

"Moral, spiritual excellence, that which we confide in and revere, is not, and from its nature cannot be an instinctive, irresistible feeling infused into us from abroad, and which may grow up amidst a life of indulgence and ease. It is in its very essence a free activity, an energy of the will, a deliberate preference of the right and the holy to all things, and a chosen, cheerful surren der of every thing to these. It grows brighter and stronger in proportion to the pains it bears, the difficulties it surmounts. Can we wonder that we suffer? Is not suffering the true school of a moral being? As administered by Providence, may it not be the most necessary portion of our lot?

"Had I time I might show how suffering ministers to human excellence; how it calls forth the magnanimous and sublime virtues, and at the same time nourishes the tenderest, sweetest sympathies of our nature; how it raises us to energy and to the consciousness of our powers, and at the same time infuses the meekest dependence on God; how it stimulates toil for the goods of this world, and at the same time weans us from it and lifts us above it. I might tell you how I have seen it admonishing the heedless, reproving the presumptuous, humbling the proud, rousing the sluggish, softening the insensible, awakening