. Work out, therefore, your own knowledge
with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to
will and to do, and to know of His good pleasure. There is no
explaining and there is no disbelieving this.

And now, before bidding you good-bye, did you ever think of the
spiritual meaning of the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of
fire by night, as connected with our knowledge and our ignorance, our
light and darkness, our gladness and our sorrow? The everyday use of
this divine alternation to the wandering children of Israel, is plain
enough. Darkness is best seen against light, and light against
darkness; and its use, in a deeper sense of keeping for ever before
them the immediate presence of God in the midst of them, is not less
plain; but I sometimes think, that we who also are still in the
wilderness, and coming up from our Egypt and its fleshpots, and on our
way let us hope, through God's grace, to the celestial Canaan, may
draw from these old-world signs and wonders, that, in the mid-day of
knowledge, with daylight all about us, there is, if one could but look
for it, that perpetual pillar of cloud--that sacred darkness which
haunts all human knowledge, often the most at its highest noon; that
"look that threatens the profane;" that something, and above all, that
sense of _Some One_,--that Holy One, who inhabits eternity and its
praises, who makes darkness His secret place, His pavilion round
about, darkness and thick clouds of the sky.

And again, that in the deepest, thickest night of doubt, of fear, of
sorrow, of despair; that then, and all the most then--if we will but
look in the right _airt_, and with the seeing eye and the
understanding heart--there may be seen that Pillar of fire, of light
and of heat, to guide and quicken and cheer; knowledge and love, that
everlasting love which we know to be the Lord's. And how much better
off are we than the chosen people; their pillars were on earth, divine
in their essence, but subject doubtless to earthly perturbations and
interferences; but our guiding light is in the heavens, towards which
we take earnest heed that we are journeying.

"Once on the raging seas I rode,
The storm was loud, the night was dark;
The ocean yawned, and rudely blowed
The wind that toss'd my foundering bark.

Deep horror then my vitals froze,
Death-struck, I ceased the tide to stem,
When suddenly a star arose,
It was the Star o