sitting; and the highest praise to God is sung when he hath delivered us from the pit of woe and despair. The opening of one of the most strangely beautiful flowers, from the roughest of prickly and unsightly stems, is an emblem of the richest blooming of moral beauty and pleasure from thorns and shapes of ugliness in the growth of the immortal mind.

Our question, then, is answered. The new original song of the redeemed, which cherubim 'could not learn to chant, which should be an addition even to the rich and infinitely varied melodies of heaven, must arise from the peculiar experience of toil, temptation, and trial, through which the redeemed, under God their Father and Christ their Saviour, pass in their first abode upon earth. But there is a strict condition. They who would blend their voices in that happy choir, to which the hosts of heaven pause to listen, must be faithful in performing this toil, in overcoming this temptation, in enduring this trial. If, recurring to our illustrations, the father cannot with truth refer to any hardships he nobly bore, and sacrifices he freely made, in his early life in building up his fortunes; if his prosperity has been an accident or a gift, or a cunning booty, though it might have been far easier and more pleasant so at the time, he has no such delight of prolonged recollection and no such inclination to repeat the history, which redounds not to his honor. If the soldier can remember only that he was craven when courage breathed high around him, it will be but a gloomy picture that is hung up in his imagination. He will not dwell exultingly on the self-denials which he did

not share, or the triumphs he did nothing to secure. And if, when the billows tossed their angry crests, and the whirlwind made dread music among the rattling cords, the sailor slunk to the side or the bottom of the ship, the description of old ocean's fury, and of the motion still felt in every nerve of the rocking and engulfing waters, will lose all its magnificent charm to his fancy. The boast of his adventures will falter on his tongue. For the sweet feeling of safety, as he cowered in the hold and found the means of escape from his post, he has sold the perpetual delight of the mind.

In the "earthly things" behold perfect emblems of the "heavenly." Be faithful through the long work-day of duty, firmly resist in the fierce battle with temptation, and patiently bear under the beating and weltering storm of grief, and the over-payment of bliss shall at last come. Yea, no emigrant from Welsh hills or from Swiss mountains shall sing from his peculiar experience a song like yours! No captive of Arab tribes shall tell a thousand times of his enslaved and thirsty pilgrimage through the endless Sahara marches, with the keen zest of your memory; nor shall Napoleon, from leading his army 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 show the greatness of the blessing, develop new emotions in the spiritual nature, and yield the delight of convalescence greater than of health? 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?

170

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 " 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 stran