virtue is deliberation, and is made up of circumspection and foresight), but not for all the possible events which our teeming imagination may suggest to us. Duties are ours, and therefore we must consider and provide for them. But events are God's, and therefore we may thankfully leave them in his hands.

And Prayer enables us to do this. It makes man and things recede, and it brings forward God. It changes the alarmed inquiry, What shall I do hereafter? into the submissive question, What wilt Thou have me to do now? It turns our thoughts from wearying conjecture to hopeful action. It draws the curtain over the undistinguishable prospect and brings us to sit down and wait for its clearing up; wait peacefully, because it is not chance which is at work but God; wait patiently, because his work he will accomplish in his time. He will make all things work together for good to them that love him. He will bring the blind by a way they have not known. He will make darkness light before them and crooked things straight. Christian reader, be not curious about the future, but commit your way unto the Lord and he shall bring it to pass. Trust him for whatever interests you-your health, your comfort, your support, your family, your friends, your reputation, and your life. Be not dismayed by the shadows of coming evil. Even what seems to you

unavoidable is but a small part (O how inconceivably small!) of God's whole purpose towards you. You look out only on the immediate future; and you forget the infinite futures which stretch on behind that future. You see before you perhaps necessary effects of now existing causes; but you consider not that those effects will in their turn become causes of still subsequent effects, which may be altogether of a different character. Events must never be estimated in themselves alone but in their relations, their innumerable ramifications, their interminable sequences. But those relations are every moment changing. God is every instant modifying them. And therefore an occurrence which to-day lowers upon us as an evil, we may see to-morrow brightening up into a good. Out of the bitter root will spring the medicinal leaf or fragrant blossom. From the gloomy cloud may fall the fructifying shower, and this again give place to the enlivening Sun. Besides-suppose certain sequences of things to be indeed inevitable; suppose that pious wisdom rightly calculates concerning them and that they will come. They will not, and they cannot, come exactly as they now present themselves to our imagination. We are looking only on one class of objects, all modified and coloured by our present humour; but they will be surrounded when they come and thereby be modified, by un

imaginable other objects. We calculate on meeting them with the feeling which oppresses us at present; but we forget that we ourselves are changeable, and that our state of mind in actual contact with the future may be altogether different from that with which we are now anticipating it. Above all we are looking at them as distinct from God; let loose to work their fury on us at their will; careering in the untamed wildness of tumultuous chance : but what does faith assure to us? what will prayer enable us to feel? what will the spirit of a trustful and a hopeful child be satisfied of? That when they do come, God also will come with them; grasp them in his mighty hand; adjust them by his wisdom; turn them at his gracious will; ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm!

And therefore thirdly, a yet higher spirit of dependent prayer will be the general commendation of ourselves into the hands of God. All reference to him of our occasional joys or sorrows, all taking up to him particular hopes or fears, will form in us an habitual sense of being not alone for our Father is with us; an habitual conviction (and O how marvellous a one it is!)

"that we and our affairs

Are part of a Jehovah's cares."

For there are many moods of mind in which both pleasure and pain and fear and hope exert but little

influence on us ; in which the spirit inclines but little towards the past or future but seems balanced in itself; in which we feel with David "Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison with thee !"-" The Lord is my portion, saith my soul!" This feeling, in proportion as it becomes habitual to us, affords not only a remedy but a preventive of anxiety. It does not merely restore, it preserves the balance of the mind. Just as we are conscious of reliance on a friend even when not obliged to ask his help; just as we turn instinctively to him at the first glimpse of necessity, and thus the earliest movements of alarm are quelled; so the thought of God our Father affords to the habitually dependent mind the gravitating influence, which retains the struggling imaginations in their proper orbit and prevents their rushing onwards through infinity. This is to "pray without ceasing." This is what St. Paul refers to as the Christian's grand support, in that perplexed condition of mind in which desire and supplication hope and fear are silenced by the very impossibility of conjecturing what may be the will of God, when he tells the Romans, "The Spirit also helpeth our infirmities, for we know not what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered;" that is, with secret undeveloped aspirations, with thoughts

too deep for words. When conception fails us, and mental life cannot express itself in verbal forms; when the spirit retires from the images of sense and the creations of fancy and all the workings of the understanding, deep into itself; has nothing specific to ask because it feels its utter inability to form a definite wish; lies passive in those everlasting arms which it is sensible are underneath it; and breathes out simply "Into thy hands I commend myself, for thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, thou God of truth;" O this is the sabbath of the soul! this is "waiting on the God of our salvation all the day!" This is Faith-Faith in its highest power and noblest exercise; which asks not a disclosure of the future but is satisfied with having no one object visible but God; which desires no clearer vision of the distant shore but looks forth on the vast unvaried ocean of futurity, calm and hopeful though not a speck may be distinguished on it, nay though clouds and darkness rest upon it, assured that over the abyss the Spirit of love and life sits brooding. O for this sacred calm of soul! this holy hush of the collected mind! this losing of our petty self in the immensity of being, and reclining on the bosom of the Infinite with this one single feeling, "I wait upon the Lord,-my soul doth wait!"