not remain in it,) and will try them as gold is tried;" and in separating the precious metal from the dross, not a grain of the pure gold is lost. But what did poor Moses do, amid the murmurings and revilings of the Israelites; in which they lost sight of the pure disinterested part he had taken in leaving the splendour and attractions of a court, to espouse the cause of a poor, despised, and afflicted multitude? what did he do? why he did as thou must do, poor afflicted reader, he "cried unto the Lord;" and the Lord, in his wisdom and his love, answered his cry, affording him deliverance in faith before he gave it in reality-though, to Moses, not the less certain. With a holy boldness, therefore, Moses replied to their murmurings with this command, "Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will show to you to-day." He spoke not with a peradventure, but with an unshaken confidence. The Lord knew the case was a desperate one, consequently he not only emboldened his servant with the secret promise of complete victory, but carried home, with divine power to the hearts of the Israelites, the command which he had given them through their illustrious leader, "to stand still and see his salvation;" otherwise they never would have awaited patiently their own apparent destruction.

But, reader, we wish to go beyond the history of the Israelites of old. If thou art an Israelite indeed, and if thy way, either in providence or grace, or both, is so hedged up that thou canst see no way of escape; "if refuge has failed thee, and no man appears to care for thy soul," the history to which we have slightly referred is left upon record for thy comfort, as well as for the encouragement of the church of the living God in all ages.

Art thou, then, burdened, cast down, and distressed? Do a multitude of sorrows, vexations, and cares, both from within and from without, press down thy spirit and threaten to overwhelm thy soul? Is thy path so beset with danger and with difficulty? and is thy strength so entirely gone, and none "shut up or left," to enable thee to proceed? We say unto thee, "All hail !" Thy position is a most blessed one. "Oh, thou afflicted! tossed with tempest, and not comforted," tarry -wait-stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord. "The vision is for an appointed time, though it tarry, wait for it: it will come, it will not tarry." Thy trials, thy sorrows-however great and diversified— have not come upon thee by chance, or without the foresight and permission of thy gracious God and Father. He foresaw what was coming upon thee; he knew the difficulty and distress in which thou wouldst be involved; he saw how thy strength would fail, and thy heart be discouraged; and the little help which he is now affording thee to bear up under thy burden and cross, and the faint hope and earnest cry for deliverance, are the sure and earnest pledge of thy victory over unbelief and the devil. It is true they have conspired together to intercept thy path to destroy thy confidence-and, if possible, to hurl thee headlong to destruction; it is true thou art swimming (or, as thou thinkest, sinking) in a sea of difficulty; and such are the struggles of unbelief, despondency, and doubt, aided by their daring leader, that thou canst scarcely keep thy head above water. Nevertheless, not a single wave

shall overwhelm thee; but thou shalt surely overcome and surmount every sea of sorrow, and be again brought forth to bless and praise the name of thy great Deliverer.

We are not speaking at an uncertainty, nor advancing arguments for the truth of which we cannot vouch. On the contrary, we speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen." Since we commenced this paper, as previously hinted, our souls have sunk very low, and unbelief has risen to such a fearful height as to becloud all our prospects, and fill our minds with despondency and dread. For a confirmation of the truth of this assertion, we refer our readers to two letters signed "E. F." and "R. L." in a subsequent part of the present Number, which we received while under these painful exercises. But we would not rest here, nor would we have alluded to our own personal conflicts, and to the deep depression of spirit and sinking of heart, of which we have so recently been the subjects, but from a desire to set forth-though in the feeblest strain-the condescension, the love, and the faithfulness of our great Deliverer. All praise is due to his ever adorable Majesty; his kindness towards us, when walking through what appeared to us like the dark valley of the shadow of death, and called to wrestle and contend with sin, unbelief, and the devil, makes him, if possible, a thousand times more precious; and when we are brought through the fire, and in some measure out of the conflict, we feel that we can more entirely and unreservedly venture to leave our souls, with all our concerns, in his most blessed hands-assured as we are, at such seasons more especially, that they could not be in safer keeping. And when new blessings are thus bestowed, and our souls are led from the confines of a prison to behold again the rays of the Sun of righteousness arising with fresh light, warmth, and healing upon our benighted souls, how glorious and worthy of all praise does a gracious God and Father, in his trinity of persons, appear; and how we long for that bright morning to dawn which tells us that our work is done, and that we are summoned up on high, to behold him "no more as through a glass darkly, but face to face! Oh! what rapture, what unspeakable delight will burst upon our astonished view, when we first behold him whom now we see only by the eye of faith; when we behold him as he is, without any cloudy

doubts and fears to intercept our vision!

Thou wilt not then, as now, dear Christian, have to mourn over the ingratitude and hardness of thine heart, when the Lord has granted thee fresh and distinguishing mercies; but thou shalt be imbued with power to praise him as thou wouldst wish to praise him. If the reader's experience agrees with that of the writer, he finds that so far from being able to carry into practice what, under trouble, he tells the Lord he will do if he will but listen to his entreaties, and bestow the boon he asks— namely, speak forth his praise, and give him all the glory; he finds his heart as hard and as destitute of feeling as a stone; he looks in vain for the existence of those grateful emotions which he had previously supposed must of necessity follow deliverance; he could not have conceived himself to be so ungrateful a wretch as to regard the kindness he had so recently received at the hands of the Lord as a mere common-place,

every-day favour; a formal lifeless spirit has already taken possession of his breast; and he now learns by bitter experience, that a sweet softened grateful frame is as much the gift of God, and as far out of the reach of his puny grasp, as the earnest cry, the fervent wrestling, and precious hope, of which he had previously been the subject. This exercise is, if possible, attended with far more acute suffering than the former. It is altogether a new and unexpected trial, and involves him in such a complication of amazement and sorrow as only a fresh visit from Jesus can rectify and remove. He is learning the hard yet allimportant lesson, that the creature is nothing, less than nothing, and vanity, while Christ is all in all.

We cannot dismiss the subject without expressing our conviction of the injustice we have done it. We feel that we have only dropped a few scattered ideas gathered from our own souls' present experience, instead of following out our desires of taking up the subject in a methodical and orderly manner, by first pointing out what are the stumblingblocks in the way of the people of God, and then leading the minds of our readers to contemplate the way in which a gracious God is pleased to remove them.

We wanted to have shown how sin, and the workings of inbred corruption, are a stumbling-block-and a very fearful one, too-in the way of the Christian; that so far from a child of light and real Gospel liberty being able to live as general professors say his sentiments will allow him to live-namely, according to the fleshly desires of a sinful, polluted, and altogether vile nature he cannot indulge so much as an unholy thought or word without bringing such a load of guilt upon his conscience, and such a stumbling-block in his way, as he can no more remove than he can shake a mountain. As under the Levitical dispensation every particle of uncleanness must be removed by blood, so under the Gospel dispensation every heir of glory must have every particle of fresh-contracted guilt removed by a new application of the precious blood of a dear Immanuel to his conscience, ere he can again obtain solid peace and enjoyment. If, therefore, dear reader, sin has had the mastery over thee, and thou art brought, under the sweet anointings of God the Holy Ghost, to loathe and abhor thyself from having had a fresh faith's view of Jesus, of what thy sin has done, and how dearly he has procured thy pardon; we may mention a secret to thee which neither the merely professing nor the profane world will understand anything about-it is, that such has been thy distress and misery since suffered to depart from the ways of thy gracious Lord, that thou never needest a worse hell than that which thou hast endured in thy conscience; and such are now thy brokenness of spirit and contrition of heart, as thou art led again to contemplate the transactions of Gethsemane and Calvary, and as thou exclaimest with the poet,

'Twas you my sins, my cruel sins,

His chief tormentors were:

we say that such are thy feelings, that the thoughts of eternal condemnation are as endurable to thee as a fresh indulgence of thy sin. Nay,

we will go farther, and say, that such is thy abhorrence of sin, and such thy fears of falling into it, that the fervent desire of thy soul is, "Lord, if I am lost after all-if hell is my final portion, do not suffer me to grovel in sin here, and thus do the work of the devil and of mine own filthy abominable heart." Are these thy feelings, poor soul? We tell thee, then, for thy comfort, that thou canst no more be lost than God can cease to be God. Why, what thou hast been expressing is the work of God the Holy Ghost in thee. He has implanted in thine heart two distinct principles which can never, never die—the one is a love to a dear Redeemer, the other an abhorrence of sin; and thou shalt as surely be brought off more than conqueror over the latter, and behold for thyself him whom thy soul lovest, as surely as God is true.

But we must pause-not to recal what we have advanced; no, no! blessed be God, we know it is the truth, however Satan and mere formal professors may reject it, and charge us with blasphemy for so saying. We pause from another cause-lest in the endeavour to remove one stumbling-block out of the way of some of our readers, we throw another in the path of others. There are some of the family of God who probably at this time are labouring under very different feelings to those we have just alluded to; and who consequently are called to encounter a stumbling-block which nothing less than an Almighty hand can remove. We refer to such as appear to themselves to be exercised more with the love of sin, than with the plague of it. They read in the sacred word this gracious promise, Sin shall not have dominion over you, for ye are not under the law, but under grace;" so far, however, from its having its accomplishment in their happy experience, they are so harrassed with sin from day to day, and from hour to hour, that its final mastery over them, with all its direful consequences, seems inevitable. They look at many of their fellow-men, who appear to be given up to every species of depravity, and conclude that they shall soon far outrun them in vice and debauchery. The inclinations which prompt others to evil, they know, have not only an existence within their own bosoms, but that they actually constitute a part of their fallen nature, which at times so completely sets every restraint at defiance, as to resolve upon its own gratification, be even hell and eternal condemnation the result. At such seasons how awful does the position of the child of God appear to himself to be! He seems driven away, as it were, with a flood; his corruptions rise with such terrific power as threaten to stifle every spark of grace of which he once thought he had been the possessor. more he cries and groans to his absent Lord, the more desperate do his lusts appear, until at length they seem to have gained such dominion over every faculty of his soul, that to pray against the indulgence of those things which his mind is set upon, he regards as the very height of hypocrisy; so that the breath of prayer is almost stopped. Not unfrequently upon the back of this will follow a host of hard, rebellious, blasphemous thoughts against the majesty of God, which pour down like a torrent upon his soul, causing him to tremble and even to close his lips with his hands, lest he should be permitted to give utterance to them. In vain does he attempt to silence the tempter; in vain does he

The

endeavour to seek comfort from past deliverances: -the past is a blank, the future a dread unknown; the language which thunders in his ears, and is re-echoed from every avenue of his soul, is, "God has forsaken him; persecute and take him!" And with his senses almost gone, he

feels as if he were already in the tempter's grasp. Oh! where, where are free-will and human power now? Where is the cultivation of the graces of faith, hope, and expectation now? To tell a soul in such circumstances so to do, is as vain as for the prophets of Baal to call upon their gods to send fire from heaven, to consume their sacrifice.

Does the reader happen to be in the situation we have been describing; and does he inquire, "What shall I do ?" We reply, Fall before God-cast yourself at the foot of the mercy-seat; and there, if thou art unable to tell half thy sorrows, groan out thy complaint; for the "Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered." Acknowledge thine iniquity; keep nothing back; and, though it be only in stammering, broken accents, confess the treachery of thine heartthe vileness of thy nature-and thy proneness to wander from thy best Friend. Tell him, moreover, of the power of thine adversary-the strength of thy corruption, and thy conviction that there is not a sin into which thou shouldst not fall if left of him; nor a place of torment which thou dost not deserve. But tell him, likewise, of the strength of his arm-the vastness of his love-the richness of his grace-and the efficacy of that precious blood which cleanseth from all sin. Entreat him to repel the attacks of the enemy-to baffle his skill, and enable thee, in answer to his charges of thy sinfulness and demerit, to plead the efficiency of the blood and righteousness of him who has said, "In me is thine help found."

There are, however, others of our readers-and perhaps by far the greater portion-whose experience has not been so deep as we have been mentioning, though not the less genuine and real. And now Satan plays the hypocrite, and preaches quite another doctrine to the weak and tempesttossed, true-born heir of glory to what he does to the general professor. To the latter he says, that we hold the most fearful and blasphemous views; to the former he remarks, Now this is truth, and if you really were a child of God, you would know it to be so by your own soul's experience; but all that you know about the matter is the result of education, which springs from a mere general acquaintance with the sacred cause you have dared to espouse. You are awfully deceived; your religion did not begin right; bring me an evidence of the time and the manner of its commencement-you cannot; you have merely, as it were, jumped into a profession; you have never gone deep enough; the work has been too shallow to be real; the fountains of the great deep have never been broken up in your experience, nor has the law ever been sent home to your conscience to kill you, as the apostle says, to all hope of salvation by it. And you will merely go on, for a time, in the profession you are now making, till your secret sins get the mastery over you, or some worldly pursuit leads captive your silly mind; then you will give it all up. And mark what Scripture says, The last state of that man shall be worse than the first.' It had been far better for you if you had