ve
of being turned out, unless she could collect sufficient money to pay
him. She knew not where to find the means. The room was stripped bare
of furniture to supply the calls of nature; nothing but a mattress in
one corner of the apartment, and a few cooking utensils remained. She
labored day and night, to procure work, but all her efforts were
unavailing. It appeared to her as if the Almighty had forsaken herself
and children, and had left them to perish through want.

It cannot be that God would place his image on earth, and willingly
leave them to perish from destitution. Many have been known to die of
starvation, and the tales of wretchedness and woe with which the
public ear is often filled attest the fact. Squalid forms and
threadbare garments are seen, alas! too often in this civilised world,
and the grave of the pauper is often opened to receive some unhappy
mortal, whose life had been one scene of suffering and want.
Philanthropy shudders and Christianity believes it to be a punishment,
administered by the hand of God; that the haggard cause of the starved
creature, who has thus miserably died, once contained the spirit of a
mortal undergoing the penalty of Him, who judges mankind on high, and
expiating through his heart-rending bodily agony, crimes committed in
by-gone days.

This is not so in all cases. What mercy could we attribute to God, did
he willingly entail misery upon the innocent, or punish them for the
crimes of the guilty? Why call it a dispensation of Divine justice,
that would condemn to weeks, months and years of wretchedness, the
mortals he brought in the world himself? Who hath seen the hovel of
the pauper; beheld its wretched inmates, heard their tale of woe,
heard them tell of days passing without their having a crumb of bread
to satisfy the cravings of hunger, or seen them in that last stage of
destitution, when hunger brings on despair, until the mind wanders
from its seat, and madness takes its place; heard the raving of the
maniac, his frenzied call for bread, and his abject desolation, until
death came kindly to relieve his sufferings, and felt not that the
hand of God had never worked so much ill for his people? Is it
profanity to say that the eye of God had wandered from them? We
believe it; for the Book that teaches us of the Almighty, depicts him
as a God of mercy and compassion. The eye of the Omnipotent is not
upon the wretched. "He seeth all things," but there are times when H