along the snowy ridges of the Alps, have so great power and command in his own will gladly to remember, as you from your bloodless victories. The temporary roughness of your lot shall soften the progress of your unbounded career. Does not the harbor's sight at break of day, opening its safe seclusion, rejoice the seaman's heart in proportion to the rough and boisterous weather of his course? Can a stout and unbroken constitution give the enjoyment arising from those interruptions of sickness which measure for us the blessing of health, develop new emotions in the spiritual nature, and yield the delight of convalescence greater than that even of bodily soundness and vigor? Such to the redeemed, who have been faithful to their God and Saviour, will be their final health and everlasting refuge. The edge of earthly trial will plane smooth to their feet the floor of heaven. John's Apocalypse, now dim to this sensual, earthly vision of ours, shall gather brightness and power to their translated souls.

An ancient poet says, it is a delight to stand or walk upon the shore, and to see a ship tossed with tempest upon the sea; or to be in a fortified tower, and see hosts mingle upon a plain. But what is such pleasure compared with that felt by those who look down from the firm ground of heaven upon their own tossings in the voyage they have with a sacred and religious faithfulness accomplished, and fix their retrospective eye on the fight they, with a holy obstinacy, waged with their own passions and besetting sins? Overpassing the deluge of time,

and discharged from the warfare, they at once join in the new song which they and their companions alone of all God's universe can sing in the common household of the saved. Shall not ours be the toil, the battle, the endurance now, that ours may be the song and the harping then?

DISCOURSE XVII.

I AM A STRANGER ON THE EARTH.

Psalm cxix. 19. I AM A STRANGER ON THE EARTH.

THERE is something very affecting in this expression. You can hardly hear it without some moving of your sensibilities. In your more serious moods, you must have paused over it, and had it return to you with a stirring power. For, in truth, it comes from no superficial or accidental chord of feeling, but swells from the depths of the soul like a solemn dirge. It is emphatically repeated, at long intervals, in the Scriptures. The psalmist says again, "I am a stranger with Thee and a sojourner, as all my fathers were." Once more, he speaks in the name of all the people, "We are strangers before Thee and sojourners." Abraham, ages earlier, uses the same language. The writer to the Hebrews takes up their strain of sacred antiquity, and says, "They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth."

The emotion which the very phrase excites, running down from the earliest times to the present generation, shows that it refers to something perma

nent in human nature. Plato felt it when he tried to prove, from the nature of the soul's operations, that it was but a mysterious visitor from some pre-existent state. A modern author felt it when he described men as ships passing each other on the ocean, and hailing each other in vain for directions on the way. My friend felt it when he confessed his ignorance before this great question of our being and destiny. Very shallow must have been our experience, very lightly must we have pondered our condition, if we too have never felt it, and responded to the declaration, "I am a stranger on the earth." Very sound must have been that man's spiritual slumber who has not opened his eyes to perceive that his relations to visible objects around him, and to human creatures like himself, do not explain his whole position and being in the world; nay, that his close and endearing connections with kindred and friends do not supply all his wants, and cannot furnish for him a complete home. But to his thoughtful mind, the truth vindicates itself. He is "a stranger." No human love or sympathy, no offices of kindness or earthly respect, can fend off from him the sense of loneliness and need, or give him the feeling here of perfect familiarity and satisfaction.

Even while the fondest ties rest unbroken, the soul in every bosom, as it fully awakes, says to parent, says to husband, says to wife, and says to child, "Ye are very dear to me. God be blessed for the happy and holy bonds that unite us! But, in the so mysterious existence I pass in time, eternity behind and

before and immensity around me, I feel like a 'stranger.' Wafted hither, I know not by what wind, in some vessel of incomprehensible power, I am landed on an unknown shore. A few things I have become accustomed to, a few persons I have formed acquaintance with; but the vast universe around, obscure and shining, stretches beyond this point of my attainment into unfathomed abysses. Pleasant is life, delicious is hope, precious is affection; but my footing is insecure: 'I am a stranger on the earth.'"

So is it while all our fixtures of habitual dependence stand. But, when they are smitten down, and those we leaned on, like props sinking in the flood, vanish away, then the feeling of the "stranger on earth" rises with redoubled power. Under any great disappointment or alteration of our circumstances, this alien feeling will arise, the scene around us put on a look of strangeness, and a voice be heard inwardly exhorting us, "Arise and depart, for this is not your rest." The world is beautiful and glorious: it lies around us, as one has said, "like a bright sea, with boundless fluctuations." But we are not at home in it. We are lost and bewildered amid its splendors. We are unsafe amid its wasting forces. We are but little versed in its capacious stores. Our hold upon it is faint and transient. So, across the gulf of past ages, we enter into eager sympathy with those old believers who confessed that they too were strangers; and we would seek with them "a city which hath foundations."