. What, then, was the surprise of the youth,
having such impressions, to hear a discourse unassuming in its dictates,
mild in its requisitions, and of a style and temper the most soothing
and persuasive!

The devotions commenced with a hymn, two lines of which, at a time,
having been read and repeated by the preacher, furnished a guide to the
congregation; the female portion of which generally united to sing, and
in a style the sweetness of which was doubly effective from the utter
absence of all ornament in the music. The strains were just such as the
old shepherds, out among the hills, tending their charges, might have
been heard to pour forth, almost unconsciously, to that God who
sometimes condescended to walk along with them. After this was over, the
preacher rose, and read, with a voice as clear as unaffected, the
twenty-third psalm of David, the images of which are borrowed chiefly
from the life in the wilderness, and were therefore not unsuited to the
ears of those to whom it was now addressed. Without proposing any one
portion of this performance as a text or subject of commentary, and
without seeking, as is quite too frequently the case with small
teachers, to explain doubtful passages of little meaning and no
importance, he delivered a discourse, in which he simply dilated upon
and carried out, for the benefit of those about him, and with a direct
reference to the case of all of them, those beautiful portraits of a
good shepherd and guardian God which the production which he read
furnished to his hands. He spoke of the dependence of the
creature--instanced, as it is daily, by a thousand wants and exigencies,
for which, unless by the care and under the countenance of Providence,
he could never of himself provide. He narrated the dangers of the
forest--imaging by this figure the mazes and mysteries of life--the
difficulty, nay, the almost utter impossibility, unless by His sanction,
of procuring sustenance, and of counteracting those innumerable
incidents by fell and flood, which, in a single moment, defeat the cares
of the hunter and the husbandman--setting at naught his industry,
destroying his fields and cattle, blighting his crops, and tearing up
with the wing of the hurricane even the cottage which gives shelter to
his little ones. He dwelt largely and long upon those numberless and
sudden events in the progress of life and human circumstance, over
which, as they could neither be foreseen nor combated with