TO bear the evils and sorrows which may be appointed us, with a patient mind, should be the continual effort of our sex. It seems, indeed, to be expected of us; since the passive and enduring virtues, are more immediately within our province.

  Let us, dear friends, when all is fair and bright around us, meditate on the uses of affliction, and thus like the "armourer accomplishing the knight," be in some measure girded for its approach. None are exempted from the visitations of disappointment and sorrow. All should be made better by them. Every one kindles a flame, which might help to melt the dross of selfishness, or consume our inordinate love of the world; and their ashes, were we more faithful in such husbandry, would quicken the germination of that holy seed, whose ripened fruit is for a better world.

  We cannot perceive, that an unbroken course of prosperity is favourable to devotion. Sloth, pride, and want of sympathy for the woes of others, are too often its attendants. It might

  A poor inhabitant of the northern isles of Scotland, left for the first time the rugged shore of St. Kilda, where in the dark cabin of his father he had been nurtured, as the arctick pine, amid the crevices of the rock. When the boat approached the coast of Mull, he gazed with wonder, as on an unbounded hemisphere. A passenger mocked the simple-hearted man, with tales of the magnificence which reigned there. He also ridiculed the poverty of St. Kilda. The son of the rock, listened in silence. If he felt the caustick, he forbore to retaliate. At length the officious narrator said, "heard ye ever of God, in that bleak island of St. Kilda?

  "From whence came you?" inquired the taciturn and grave Highlander.

  "O, from a beauteous land where the fields give us wheat before we ask for it, where rich fruits make the air fragrant, and honey fills every flower."

  "Came ye from so fair a land? Man, might forget God there. In my own St. Kilda he never can. Building his home on a rock, suspended over a precipice, chilled by the wintry wind, tossed on the wild ocean, he never can forget his God. No, he hangs every moment on his arm."

  Where man shall turn for solace in adversity, has been his earnest inquiry, ever since he was placed upon the earth. Since his expulsion from Paradise, he has ever had seasons of wandering and of woe, "seeking rest, and finding none."

  Nature prompts the sorrowful to repose upon some kindred spirit, to lay part of their burden, upon the nearest in friendship or affection. Yet there are evils, which the most perfect union of hearts, cannot alleviate. The perpetual sadness of a broken spirit, is beyond the reach of external intercourse. Indeed, the most incurable evils, sometimes spring from the closest affinities. The parent may be doomed to see the child, in whom his proudest hopes were garnered up, smite down those hopes and trample their roots, though they grew in the "deep of his heart." Will friendship comfort him? The wife may find the idol of her love, the victim of vice, or estranged from her as an enemy. What remaining affection can fill the void in her soul? Bereavements may be so bitter and entire, that none shall be left to comfort the lonely survivor. The poor

  Still the question returns, where shall we look for solace, under such adversities as transcend the help of man? The poetry of Philosophy replies, that Time is the physician of grief. We see that he is so for common losses, or for those that more immediately affect the passions. But are there not afflictions, whose extent is made more evident by the lapse of years? where the tempest of sorrow indeed abates, but where the waste of comfort, the desolation of hope, the impossibility of restitution, only become more apparent? To such, Time acts only as a torch-bearer, revealing the extent of a ruin, which he has no power to repair. He may indeed, cause the tide of weeping to roll back, but it is to discover the magnitude of the wreck, the multitude of precious things thrown over in the storm, fragments of treasure, which the tantalizing surge displays for a moment, and then swallows up forever.

  Time may indeed, be a successful physician for the sorrows of youth. Then, the buoyant heart voluntarily co-operates with any sanitary regimen. It is fruitful in substitutes for lost delights. In its vigorous policy, it scarcely waits for Time to aid in repairing the breaches in its sanctuary. Then, when its tendrils are stricken from one

  Far otherwise is it, in the wane of life. The heart, often bruised, often smitten, clings with a more rigid grasp to its diminishing joys. As the circle grows narrower, it struggles to spread itself over the whole of it, to touch and to guard every point. But the pilgrim of many lustrums, cannot hope to call forth in young bosoms, the reciprocity which the fervour of his own prime enkindled. Between him and them "is a great gulf fixed." The affections lose the power of re-production. They have no longer that Promethean fire, by which dead elements are quickened into friendship. The path of life has become to them, as the "valley of dry bones." They wander through it, without the ability to bid one skeleton arise, and be clothed with flesh. They become too inert, to enchain even the living and willing objects that surround them. Like the ruminating animals, they slumber over the food, which once they pursued, as the fleet roe-buck upon the mountains.

  It is possible also, that with years, a kind of hallowed jealousy may steal over the soul. Perhaps it may refuse to admit new imagery to a shrine, where its earliest chosen, longest-consecrated idols dwelt, and were worshipped. With a morbid, yet blameless constancy, it may hermetically

  Therefore, the medical influence of Time, at its highest power, ranks only as a sedative. It cannot extirpate those roots of sorrow, which strike to the extremest verge of human life. Especially will the hoary-headed, if they trust Time as their sole physician, find him stupifying their senses with a transient opiate, but leaving the heart's wounds to rankle and rankle, till, like the bereaved patriarch, they "go down into the grave, to the lost one, mourning."

  The inquiry still recurs, where shall we turn, under the deepest calamities, that are appointed to humanity? A sterner philosophy than that at first quoted, answers "rise above them, be insensible to them." "Oh, but man is too frail and sensitive, too much wrapped up in a net-work of nerves, and too faint at heart, to stand against the dread artillery of woe. A baleful wind sweeps away his strength; a frown on the face of one he loves, drinks up his spirit; the fickle breath of the populace inflates him; the dew-drops in his broken cistern dry up, and he is in bitterness; fever touches his clay-temple, and he is gone. He who cannot cope with the feeblest agent, is expected to stand unmelted in the "seven-times heated furnace." He cannot resist the elements: how can he endure the wrath of their Omnipotent

  That remedy for adversity, which neither the light of nature discovered, nor the pharmacopeia of Time contained, of which Philosophy both in its poetry and its stoicism has failed, is contained in a single prescription of the Gospel, the submission of our will, to that which is divine. How simply is it illustrated in the aspiration of Thomas a Kempis. "Give me what thou wilt, and in what measure, and at what time thou wilt. Do with me what thou knowest to be best, what best pleaseth thee. Place me where thou wilt, freely dispose of me in all things."

  Still more concisely was it expressed by Fenelon, "I am silent; I offer myself in sacrifice; henceforth, I have no will, save to accomplish thine:" but ah, how much more forcibly in that agonizing sigh from Gethsemane, "not my will, but thine be done," when even the strengthening angel was astonished, and Earth trembled as she tasted the first trickling drops of her Redeemer's blood.