an unerring physician of the body sent to a
consumptive family who left it as his prescription: "How hardly shall
they survive the climate of the North; it is easier for a camel to go
through a needle's eye than your children escape destruction in the
blasts of the North"; if after this you saw the parents struggling
for northern climates, you must say they either did not believe the
physician, or they were deliberately doing what they could to destroy
their children.

Again I say, let me not be misunderstood, as though I wished to make
all Christianity consist in giving up money, time, and talents,
unless they are the expressions of love to the Lord, and flow from a
desire to meet His mind and promote his glory, they are but sounding
brass and tinkling cymbals. Yet surely, they are the natural external
expressions of internal love; and although they be insincerely
assumed by Hypocrisy, it is her homage to truth; and although the
self-righteous Pharisee may present the semblance of devotion, as a
vain and hateful barter for heaven, yet it requires very little
spirituality of mind to discern that this arises in a different
source and terminates in a different object: the one begins in self
and ends in self; the other begins in Christ, and ends in Christ.
When, therefore, the Lord requires his Church to be careful for
nothing, it is only that He might display his watchfulness and
carefulness over her. Surely it is a most unspeakable privilege to be
allowed to cast all our cares upon God; and to feel that we are
thereby delivered from the slavery of earthly expectations, and made
free to speak the truth m love, without fear or apprehension? What is
the glorious liberty of the children of God, but to be dependent only
upon One, "who giveth liberally and upbraideth not,"--who
says,--"Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock,
and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh,
receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth: and to him that knocketh it
shall be opened." God, in pity to our weakness and unbelief,
condescends to reason with us thus:--"What man is there of you, whom,
if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish,
will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give
good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father, which
is in heaven, give good things to them that ask him?" (Matthew 7. 7,
etc.). Let us therefore do the will of such a Father to