re, in the midst of life,
we realize disappointments, losses, painful diseases and heart-rending
discouragements, defeated hopes and withered honors. Here are good
reasons for the interposition of redeeming love. Does the God who loves
us sympathize with us in our woes? We are liable at every step in life
to great individual and domestic calamities. No hour can be free from
the fear that what we value the most on the earth may be snatched away
to-morrow.

Trees and flowers grow to their full stature, fill up their measure of
time, and pass away. Beasts and birds are more rarely cut off with
disease. Their lives are not embittered with the expectation of death;
the knowledge of the past and the present is all they have; they have no
knowledge of the morrow; they live contented in their ignorance and
indifference, and, at last, sink into the deep, unending night, "being
made to be taken and destroyed."

But this is not the history of man. He perishes from the cradle to the
tomb--"suffers a hundred deaths in fearing one." He is conscious of the
dangers that beset him. He is hedged in on every side. Death is
constantly destroying his fondest hopes and causing him the sorest
grief. It bursts the ties that bind heart to heart, and the dearest
fellowships are severed, and the joys of a blessed life are wrapped in
the gloom of death. All there was of earthly bliss in the bygone now
makes up his anguish. Is it possible that life and death walk
"arm-in-arm?" Yes; even while we are happy in the enjoyment of one, the
other comes and casts the fearful mantle over all our earthly prospects.
Seal up this blessed volume of life, and I know not from whence the
light is to spring which would cheer this gloomy picture. Without this,
man would be in a grade of blessedness beneath the brutes that perish.
It would be better to be anything than rational without the religion of
Jesus Christ and the intelligence of the Bible. The Scriptures inform us
that these things have a cause, that they come from God's dealings with
his creatures, that the unseen hand which permits these trials is
benevolent and wise. Sorrow has its design, and it is neither unkind nor
malignant. These things have a moral cause; they are the great rebuke of
God for sin. They are also a part of the discipline of a Heavenly
Father, designed to co-operate with the Gospel in bringing back all
those who are intelligently exercised thereby to their forsaken God.

The antidote