IX.-ON AFFLICTION.

BEFORE his renewal unto holiness, a man finds that though he may enjoy frequent pleasures, and long amuse himself with what the world calls happiness, yet still there is something dark and fearful to which, when left to itself, his mind naturally reverts. Such joys are like beams of sunshine which traverse a stormy sky. But after conversion, though cares, and troubles, and afflictions may surround and oppress him, a settled and stedfast hope is the resting-place of thought. Such sorrows are like the heavy clouds which conceal, and sometimes almost make us, by their long continuance, forget the face of the azure heavens, but cannot destroy, although they veil their glory.

Sorrow is the sinner's entailed inheritance. All that he meets with besides in this world, is the free gift of mercy and goodness; and Divine grace enables him to number the afflictions to which sin has rendered him liable among his blessings. So that God's kindness and favour to a particular person, can in no case be known by the apparent

good or evil that is before him. God dealeth with Christians as with sons, and "what son is he whom his father chasteneth not?" In our past conduct, we may often read the cause of our present affliction, and the striking adaptation of the chastisement to the reproof and correction of our particular transgression, will plainly show the design of providence therein. But sometimes unable to discern for what sins we are corrected, we lie down as it were in darkness, and listen to the thunders of God's fearful indignation.

Perhaps every cause of exaltation which a Christian possesses, has its counterbalancing cause of abasement, every sail of joy its ballast of sorrow: thus a Pascal had his nervous illness, a Luther his visionary visitant, a St. Paul his thorn in the flesh. Our vexation and trouble are often strangely disproportionate to the causes which excite them, and seem to depend rather upon the previous state of our own soul and body, than upon external circumstances.

After having suffered severely from some particular form of pain, disease, or distress, our hearts will often sigh forth the longing wish, that providential chastisement may not again be inflicted by the same instrument, secretly hoping that any other will give less poignant anguish, and be easier to bear: but alas! experience can testify to the Almighty power of him, who, though he chastens in mercy and in measure, and doth not

willingly afflict or grieve the children of men, can, by what means he will, send the racking thrill of agony, or the throb of deadly sickness through the frame, and becloud the mind with a blackness so dense, as to reveal only the lightnings of terror which at times outdazzle the steady rays of the star of hope.

God makes what he will an instrument of inflicting pain. We suffer, and have as distinct and keen a consciousness of suffering, whatever that instrument may be, whether one of personal affliction or of sympathy.

How many are the varieties of human misery! how great is their intensity! Could the heart of any man distinctly and fully recollect at once, every vexation and affliction which it has ever known, it would surely break. A half-remembered survey of our more striking scenes of sorrow, is often sufficient to renew their poignancy. But examples teach us, that some piercing grief has often proved the stimulant of excellence.

An acquired capability of enduring bodily pain does not lessen the sufferer's sense of its keenness, nor substitute apathy for anguish; neither can habitual control exercised over the heart, ever extirpate its feelings, and substitute indifference for acute sensibilities.

Body and mind, though they share in all each other's sufferings, are susceptible, each for itself, of miseries more especially suited to touch the

material or spiritual part, and to reach the other only through its associate. The body's close participation in the soul's acts, may be particularly remarked, when mental affliction, causing a partial or impeded circulation of the blood, induces that heavy and distressing sensation called the heart-ache.

Sometimes it is the Christian's lot to climb mountains of difficulty, amid thick mists and tempestuous winds, but though he trembles at the thought of the crumbling crags and unseen precipices among which he is passing, and starts perchance at the apparition of living shapes magnified into giants, he trusts his guide, and can tread the steep ridge, at whose abrupt sides float seas vapour in undulating motion, with confidence and hope, faint, yet pursuing the object of his toil.

of

The strange dissimilarity between the feeling with which the Christian, when daily pouring out his heart before God, renounces earth for heaven, time for eternity, and natural good for spiritual, and that with which his prayer ascends in agony of spirit from a suffering body, seems to make manifest the difference between a mere resolution, and its execution, and to prove the real preference of the soul.

Bodily afflictions are suited to abase us in our own eyes, for they humble us in the eyes of others; they make' us objects of pity to the kind, and of scorn to the proud.

None but those persons who have severally experienced the peculiar wretchedness of each lot, can duly estimate the sorrows of various sickness, of melancholy blindness, of unsocializing deafness, of shocking loss of limbs, of helpless infirmities, of fearful mental maladies. If one affliction presses heavily upon us, we have still to be thankful for exemption from another, and even should all these evils threaten us, and with the aggravations of poverty and contempt seem ready to overwhelm us, the remembrance of a God" that heareth prayer," an Intercessor "touched with the feeling of our infirmities," a Holy Ghost the Comforter, and heaven at hand, can make a Christian happy in the midst of them.

But in calamities which seem cast upon us by the hand of irresistible might, and secure at once our passive submission, we commonly find more present profit, and more inward support and comfort, than in those which excite and pain our affections, making as it were a battle field of the mind, a scene of conflict and horror, where the clouding smoke of the warfare obscures the combatant's view of his advantage, though it prevents not the smart of his wounds. When it has indeed become the settled habit of the soul to bend to God's will, and to seek his blessing, to labour after the submissiveness of resignation, and the calmness of contentment, to look not so much for present pleasure, as for real profit in whatever happens,