more, in every thing to give thanks, and to welcome tribulation as working for us an exceeding and eternal weight of glory.

The language which the Scriptures direct us to adopt in times of darkness is such language as the following: "When my soul fainteth I will remember the Lord; He is my light and my refuge, therefore will I not fear, though the earth be removed and the mountains be carried ⚫ into the midst of the sea. O Lord of hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth in Thee; he shall not be afraid of the terror by night, or the arrow that flieth by day; no evil shall befall him, neither shall any plague come nigh his dwelling."

FILIAL TRUST.

My Father! when around me spread
I see the shadows of the tomb,
And life's bright visions droop and fade,
And darkness veils my future doom;

Oh, in that anguished hour I turn

With a still trusting heart to thee!

And holy thoughts still shine and burn
Amid that cold, sad destiny.

They fill my soul with heavenly light,
While all around is pain and woe;
And strengthened by them in thy sight,
Father, to drink thy cup I go!

Thy will be done-I will not fear
The fate provided by thy love;
Though clouds and darkness shroud me here,
I know that all is bright above.

The stars of heaven are shining on,

Though these frail eyes are dim with tears;
The hopes of earth indeed are gone,
But are not ours th' immortal years?

Father! forgive the heart that clings
Thus trembling to the things of time,
And bid my soul on angel wings
Ascend into a purer clime!

There shall no doubts disturb its trust,
No sorrows dim celestial love;
But these afflictions of the dust,
Like shadows of the night, remove.

That glorious hour will well repay
A life of toil, and care, and woe;
Oh Father! joyful on my way,
To drink thy bitter cup I go!

THE FUTURE LIFE.

THERE is one method in which Christ's resurrection gives aid to our faith in another life, which is not often dwelt on, and which seems to me worthy of attention. Our chief doubts and difficulties in regard to that state spring chiefly from the senses and the imagination, and not from the reason. The eye fixed on the lifeless body, on the wan features and the motionless limbs, and the imagination following the frame into the dark tomb, and representing to itself the stages of decay and ruin, are apt to fill and oppress the mind with discouraging and appalling thoughts. The senses can detect in the pale corpse not a trace of the activity of that spirit which lately moved it. Death seems to have achieved an entire victory;

and when reason and revelation speak of continued and a higher life, the senses and imagination, pointing to the disfigured and mouldering body, obscure by their sad forebodings the light which reason and revelation strive to kindle in the bereaved soul.

Now the resurrection of Christ meets, if I may so say, the senses and imagination on their own ground, contends with them with their own weapons. It shows us the very frame on which death in its most humiliating form had set its seal, and which had been committed in utter hopelessness to the tomb, rising, breathing, moving with new life; and rising not to return again to the earth, but, after a short sojourn, to ascend from the earth to a purer region, and thus to attest man's destination to a higher life. These facts, submitted to the very senses, and almost necessarily kindling the imagination to explore the unseen world, seem to me particularly suited to overcome the main difficulties in the way of Christian faith.

Reason is not left to struggle alone with the horrors of the tomb. The assurance that Jesus Christ, who lived on the earth, who died on the cross, and was committed a mutilated, bleeding frame to the receptacle of the dead, rose uninjured, and then exchanged an earthly for a heavenly life, puts to flight the said auguries which rise like spectres from the grave, and helps us to conceive, as in our present weakness we could not otherwise conceive, of man's appointed triumph over death.

Such is one of the aids given by the resurrection to faith in immortality. Still this faith is lamentably weak in the multitude of men. To multitudes heaven is almost a world of fancy. It wants substance. The idea of a world in which beings exist without these gross bodies, exist as pure spirits, or clothed with refined and spiritual frames, strikes them as a fiction. What cannot be seen or touched, This is mournful but not appears unreal. wonderful; for how can men, who immerse themselves in the body and its in