the power of God perfecting its might in weakness⚫ the flowing in of grace into a soul, which grace has first made willing and able to receive it. How wondrous must the faith of Abraham have appeared to himself, when he came to reflect on what he had done, or rather what the grace of God had wrought in him, in his willingness to offer up Isaac. Inferior to this, of course, but analogous to it, has been the surprise of many an afflicted widow at the submission and confidence with which she laid the ashes of her husband in the sepulchre. What else could have so sustained her, bereft as she was of what gave to earth its chief interest? Let that religion still support you. What it has done, it can do. It has proved to you its reality and its power: still trust it as the anchor of your soul, sure and stedfast. If it prevented you from sinking, when the shock came first upon you, it can do the same through every future stage of your solitary journeying, and every future scene of vour now unshared sorrow.

But perhaps your present situation demonstrates the excellency of religion, by another medium of proof, I mean by the want of it. You have not religion to support you, and you have therefore literally nothing. The storm has come, and you are without a shelter. The cup of wormwood and gall is put into your hand, and you have nothing with which to sweeten it. Well then now, when every thing else fails, turn to this one and only refuge hat

remains. It opens to you now.

You feel that noth

ing else is of any avail. It is not too late. God waits to be gracious. Oh let me now sound in your ears the music of our Lord's comfortable words, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' Oh mark that, the heavy laden. No matter what may be the burden whether of sin, or of care, or of sorrow, there is resi from it in Christ. If you look to him by faith to take away the burden of your sin, he will lighten every other load that presses upon your spirit. Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the lost, is the comforter of the distressed. He meets the natural cry of misery, and goes out to wipe away the tears of sorrow, by the hand of his redeeming mercy. He came to bind up the broken-hearted, and to comfort those that mourn: but it is in his own way. Many have come to him, led as it seemed by the mere instinctive longing after happiness, and have tried faith in the gospel as a last and almost hopeless experiment, after the failure of every other attempt to obtain consolation. And oh! what an unlooked for discovery have they made; they who had found no resting place in the world, and who had wandered through it in quest of some object however insignificant, that might divert them from their sorrows, and for a moment at least remove the sense of that hopeless grief which lay dead upon the heart, found now an object which the widest desires of their soul could not grasp, and of such irresistible power as to turn the current of their feelings, I mean the salvation which is in Christ Jesus,

with eternal glory. They who had been ready to abandon life, as having no charm, and to embrace death as having no greater terror than their present affliction, now see that even in the absence of that which once threw over their existence its deepest interest, they can find something worth living for, in the pursuit of an eternal joy. While in sorrow and in desolation they went to Jesus for comfort, the Spirit, whose secret, but unknown influence guided their steps, opened the eyes of their understanding to discern the path of life, and by the aid of a hope full of immortality, to rise above the ravages of death, and the spoliations of the grave. Thus while like Mary Magdalene, they were lingering round the sepulchre, the Saviour revealed himself to them, and they dried up their tears in the presence of their Lord. May it be so with those who shall read these pages. May you in your affliction turn to religion, that grana catholicon, and panacea, for the sorrows of life. You do not know, even yet, how much you will need it, in the future stages of your sad and solitary journey. The friends whom the freshness of your grief has gathered round you, may forget your loss much sooner than you will; and the force of their sympathy may have spent itself, long before the tide of your grief has ceased to flow. Few, very few, are the faithful friends whose tender interest is as long lived and as deep as our tribulation. Sympathy wears out long before that which calls it into existence: and then, what can comfort you but religion? Venture

not forward, without decided and fervent piety. Let your next step be from the tomb of a husband, to the cross of a Saviour.

Take the following instance as at once a direction and an encouragement:

In the course of my pastoral walks among my flock, I one day called upon a young widow, who has become a member of the church under my care since the death of her husband. I found her at her mangle, by which, and by letting a room or two to lodgers, she earns a scanty and precarious support for herself and child. I found her somewhat indisposed, exhausted by labor, and depressed, though not desponding, in consequence of her lodgings being unoccupied, and her work rather short. I entered into conversation with her on her necessitous and afflictive circumstances, when she expressed her strong confidence in God, and her expectation she should be provided for. She soon reverted to her husband, who had been a consistent member of my flock. Her eulogy upon his memory was in strong and tender language. She described him as having been one of the kindest and most indulgent of husbands, and implied that she had of course been a happy wife :- -"But," said she, "I can thank the Lord for his death, for in consequence of that sad event, 1 now hope to be associated with him, in the presence of Christ in heaven." The fact is, the death of her husband was the painful means, in the hands of the Spirit, of her saving conversion to God In this you

see one instance among many in which widowhood has been the furnace of affliction, where God has chosen some of his people, and called them to pass through the fiery trial to bring them to himself. The female whose case I am now narrating, by the piety she then obtained, and by the sweet hope of meeting her deceased husband in the land where there shall be no more death, endures with a sorrowful cheerfulness the desolation of widowhood and the rigours of poverty.

What lessons does this little incident teach! What a potency and a heavenly balm are there in true religion; what present and what future advantages does it yield, when it can enable a poor widow, to bow with her fatherless child at the grave of her departed husband, or in the dreary abode once made happy by his presence and his love, and give God thanks for his removal, because of the eternal felicity that would result to both in heaven, from their early separation upon earth! What an admonition tc those who like this poor woman have lost pious husbands, while they themselves are not yet partakers of true experimental piety. Let them consider the reasoning which is implied in her gratitude, —“Had my husband lived, I should have been content with my happiness as a wife, and have sough none from a higher source, and perhaps have lived and died a stranger to true religion. Thus after en joying his society a few years upon earth, I should have been banished not only from his company but