by the lessons of experience,
to seek anxiously, and to pray to be enabled to see distinctly, the
peculiar manner in which each trial of your daily lot is adapted to your
own individual case.

I do not speak now of great trials, of such afflictions as crush the
sufferer in the dust. When the hand of God is so plainly seen, it is
comparatively easy to submit, and his Holy Spirit, ever fulfilling the
promise "as thy day is, so shall thy strength be,"[15] sometimes makes
the riven heart strong to bear that which, in prospective, it dares not
even contemplate. You, however, have had no trial of this nature; yours
are the petty irritations, the small vexations which "smart more because
they hold in Holy Writ no place."[16] Even at more peaceful times, when
you can contemplate with resignation the general features of your lot in
life, you cannot subdue your spirit to patience under the hourly varying
annoyances and temptations with which you are beset. The peculiar
sensitiveness of your disposition, your affectionate, generous nature,
your refinement of mind, and quick tact, all expose you to suffer more
severely than others from the selfishness, the coarse-mindedness, the
bluntness of perception of those around you. You often say, in the
bitterness of your heart, Any other trial but this I could have borne;
every other chastisement would have been light in comparison. But why
have you so little faith? Why do you not see that it is because all
these petty trials are so severe to you, therefore are they sent? All
these amiable qualities that I have enumerated, and the love which they
win for you, would make you admire and value yourself too much, unless
your system were reduced, so to speak, by a series of petty but
continued annoyances. As I said before, you must seek to strengthen your
faith by tracing the close connection between these annoyances and the
"needs be" for them. It is probably exactly at the time when you are too
much elated by praise and admiration that you are sent some
counterbalancing annoyance, or perhaps suffered to fall into some fault
of temper which will lessen you in your own eyes, as well as in those of
others. You are often troubled by some annoyance, too, when you have
blamed others for being too easily overcome by an annoyance of the very
same kind. "Stand upon" an anxious "watch," and you will see how
constantly severe judgments of others are punished by falling ourselves
into temptations simila