While under his afflicting hand we find, And pass the reach of all that now disturbs By which his wisdom has prepared his saints And be my frowning friend. A friend that frowns NO FEARS OF DEATH. "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." Ps. xxiii. 4. rors. Unbelief and error render death the king of terWhere they come to the couch of the dying, we wonder not that there is gloom, and fear, and unutterable agony. But where Christian hope looks away from this present time, beyond the conflict of death, and takes hold on the future, it finds that future all bright with the promise and power of God. Heavenly inspiration bids this hope rejoice and say, "God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave; for he shall receive me. My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Sutton, in his old work entitled "Learn to Die," has the following quaint, yet admonitory observations: "When Moses saw his rod turned into a serpent, it did at first somewhat affright him, for he began to step from it. But when God commanded him to take hold thereof, he found afterward, by many effects, it did him and the people of God much good. At first sight, DEATH doth fray our natural weakness, and we begin to shrink from it; but having confidence in God, who hath willed us not to fear, we find it a means to divide the waters of many tribulations, to make us a passage from the wilderness of this world unto a better, even the land of rest." NIGHT-MUSINGS IN SICKNESS. "Wearisome nights are appointed unto me." Job vii. 3. And who hath appointed them? He whose wisdom designed and whose power created all things; whose thoughts and ways are high above ours as the heavens are higher than the earth. And what though, through the watches of this night, pain and weakness must be my companions, let me know that this is but a part of the great and wonderful operations of the Father of all in his universe. Still is he good, and still he doeth good continually. His praises are hymned during this night-silence with mortals, by innumerable hosts and innumerable worlds. spirits are cheered with hopeful, thankful, exultant emotions. Let mine be. Yes, even in this night's affliction, let me praise the name of the Lord. That gloomy night in prison did his servants Paul and Silas sing praises unto him, praises which were preludes to their deliverance and victory! What was that prison to them in its darkness and dreariness, while they held such communion with the bright Other ness and glory of heaven? And what may every sick-room be but an altar of praise, a temple of thanksgiving, a spiritual banqueting place? Here let me meditate on that Providence whose care extends to the minutest creation of his hand, whose paternal affection can know no change, and who, as he causes his lights to shine in the firmament all through the night's solemn darkness, can shed upon the stricken spirit, in its lone chamber, or on its bed, during the night of sickness and pain, the beams of his cheering and unfailing love. "What though downy slumbers flee, Lodged within my Father's breast. From on high doth he impart Secret comfort to my heart; Blest alternative to me, Thus to sleep or wake with thee!" DECAY AND RENEWAL. "Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day." 2 Cor. iv. 16. What a testimony is this to the greatness of the spiritual, and its triumph over the material! Perishing, and yet increasing in vitality! "As dying, and behold we live." This surely is the miracle of faith, and yet the simplicity of truth; for it is the spiritual that has given most real life to the material, and now that the material decays, makes itself so gloriously triumphant. Talk of the decay of the spirit with the decay of the body? It is not thus Christian faith reasons. That will find life and strength amid all consumptions and dissolutions. And why? The apostle has the reason: "While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." It is from looking so exclusively at the temporal, that the spiritual dies without us. The more we rightly contemplate the eternal, the more shall we partake of its spirit, and the more enduring will be our life. Let us have the mind like Paul, and every indication of bodily decay and death would be to us but a new evidence of spiritual release, renewal and redemption. "This sickness is not unto death." John xi. 4. And what if it shall be to life again? Let that life be a new consecration to its Author, a new waiting in readiness for death, come when or how it may. If He who hath wounded hath also healed, it is that the healed one may be a helper to other stricken children of the Father a livelier witness of the loving-kindness of Heaven. To enduring Christian faith shall any sickness be unto death? Shall it not all make increase of a Divine Life? 66 Let us understand, then, that the sick-room has its advantages and blessings. When, at last," says another, we arise with exhausted strength from the sick bed, our souls often awake as out of a long night into a new morning. So many things, during the illness of the body, conspire to soften the feelings: the still room; the mild twilight through the window curtains; the low voices; and then, more than all, the kind words of those who surround us, their attention, their solicitude, perhaps a tear in their eyes; all this does us good; and when the wise Solomon enumerated all the good things which have their time upon the earth, he forgot to celebrate sickness among the rest." THE INFANT DEAD. WHAT emotions spring up in the mind as it is called to contemplate the death of the dearly loved and early departed; as it looks abroad upon the numerous burial places of these little ones of the Lord; as it looks within, and realizes the absence of a companionship which must surely now be known in other spheres of being, in other homes of the soul! Beautiful buds of promise, so suddenly broken from off the parent stem! Shall there not be a renewal of their life and fragrance in a fairer clime? Verily, there shall. These objects of affection, which Jesus took into his arms and blest, are objects of hope, also. There are reasons for thanksgiving as well as for sorrow, when these infantile blessings are called away from our hands, though not from our affections. They have left the afflictions and doubtful strifes and sins of earth; have left them early, too. The poet says of the dead infant, "God took thee in his mercy, |