erils
and privations which first explorers must undergo. Religion is the sun
that brightens our summer hours, and gives us, even through the darkest
and most stormy day, light, and confidence, and certainty. And when a
small body of men are left alone, as it were, in the wilderness with
their God, whatever occurs to them, whether of a pleasing or of a trying
character, is likely to lift up their souls to their Maker, in whom
"they live and move, and have their being." When the patient traveller,
of whose adventures in Western Australia so much mention has been made,
had waited weather-bound on a lonely coast, never before trodden by the
foot of civilised man, until eight days had been consumed in watching to
no purpose the winds and the waves,--when, at a distance of thousands of
miles from their native country, and many hundreds of miles from the
nearest English colony, he and his little party were wasting strength
and provisions in a desert spot; from which their only means of escaping
was in one frail boat, which the fury of the sea forbade them to think
of launching upon the deep,--when the men, under these circumstances,
were becoming more and more gloomy and petulant, where was it that the
commander sought and found consolation? It was in religion. And the
witness of one who has successfully gone through trials of this kind, is
well deserving of the utmost attention. "I feel assured," says Captain
Grey, in his account of this trial of patience, "that, but for the
support I derived from prayer, and frequent perusal and meditation of
the Scriptures, I should never have been able to have borne myself in
such a manner as to have maintained discipline and confidence amongst
the rest of the party; nor in all my sufferings did I ever lose the
consolation derived from a firm reliance upon the goodness of
Providence. It is only those who go forth into perils and dangers,
amidst which human foresight and strength can but little avail, and who
find themselves, day after day, protected by an unseen influence, and
ever and again snatched from the very jaws of destruction, by a power
which is not of this world, who can at all estimate the knowledge of
one's own weakness and littleness, and the firm reliance and trust upon
the goodness of the Creator, which the human breast is capable of
feeling. Like all other lessons which are of great and lasting benefit
to man, this one must be learned amid much sorrowing and woe; but,
having