fluctuations; its words of grief and haste bursting into the midst of its words of prayer; its soarings and sinkings; its passionate and familiar adjurations of heaven and earth to help it; and with the world of dark and undefined thoughts, which roll through it like waves of chaos: in short, it is a picture, whose truth can be realized only by experience.

But I was about to observe that this tendency of Job's mind in the Supreme, though it may seem to carry him, at times, up quite out of sight of the question in hand, is really a natural tendency, and that it naturally sprung from the circumstances in which he was placed. The human condition is throughout, allied to a divine power; and the strong feeling of what this condition is, always leads us to that Power. The positive good and evil of this condition, therefore, have especially this tendency. This is implied in the proem or preface of the book of Job; which gives an account after the dramatic manner which characterizes the whole book, of the circumstances that lead to Job's trial. After a brief prefatory statement informing the reader who Job was, and what were his possessions, the scene is represented as opening in heaven. Among the sons of God, Satan presents himself, the Accuser, the Adversary. And when Job's virtue is the theme of commendation, the Accuser says, "Doth Job fear God for naught? A grand Emir of the East; cradled in luxury; loaded with the benefits of heaven: doth he fear God for naught? Put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face!" It is done; and Job is stripped of his possessions, servants, children-all. And Job falls down upon the ground and worships; and says, "The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."

But again the Accuser says; thou hast not laid thine hand yet upon his person. Come yet nearer; "put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone, and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face." Again it is done; and Job is sinitten and overwhelmed with disease; and he sits down in ashes and scrapes himself with a potsherd; a pitiable and loathsome object. The faith of his wife too, gives way, of her who, above all, should have supported him then; but who, from the reverence and love which she felt for her husband, is least able to bear the sight of his misery. She cannot bear it and partaking of the prevalent feelings of the age about outward prosperity, as the very measure and test of the Divine favour, she says, "dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God and die !" "Give up the strife; you have been a good man; you have helped and comforted many; and now you are reduced to this. Give up the strife; curse God and die!" And Job answered, "thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh!" What nature ! We seem to hear that fireside conversation. What nature! and what delicacy, mingled with reproof! "Thou speakest not as my wife, but as one of the foolish, prating women speaketh. What! shall we receive good at the hand of the Lord, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips."

Then the three friends of Job came to him; and it is a beautiful trait of delicacy for those ancient times, that these friends, according to the representation, "sat down upon the ground with him seven days and seven nights, and spake not a word unto him; for they saw that his grief was great." When we recollect that all over the East, loud wailings and lamentations were the usual modes of testifying sympathy, we are led to ask, whence came-whence, but from inspiration,

this finer conception, befitting the utmost culture and delicacy of later times? "Seven days and seven nights they sat with him, and none of them spake a word to him." Of course, we are not to take this too literally. According to the Hebrew custom, they mourned with him seven days: that is, they were in his house, and they came, doubtless, and sat with him from time to time; but they entered into no large discourse with him; they saw that it was not the time for many words; they mourned in silence.

This I have said is a beautiful conception of what belongs to the most delicate and touching sympathy. There comes a time to speak, and so the friends of Job judged; though their speech proved less delicate and judicious than their silence. There comes a time to speak; there are circumstances which may make it desirable; there are easy and unforced modes of address which may make it grateful; there are cases where a thoughtful man may help his neighbour with his wisdom, or an affectionate man may comfort him, with sympathy; "a word fitly spoken," says the sacred proverbialist, "is like apples of gold in pictures of silver."

And yet after all, it seems to me that words can go but a little way into the depths of affliction. The thoughts that struggle there in silence; that go out into the silence of infinitude, into the silence of eternity, have no emblems. Thoughts enough, God knoweth, come there; such as no tongue ever uttered. And those thoughts do not so much want human sympathy as they want higher help. I deny not the sweetness of that balm; but I say that something higher is wanted. The sympathy of all good friends, too, we know that we have, without a word spoken. And moreover,

the sympathy of all the world, though grateful, would not lighten the load, one feather's weight. Something else the mind wants, something to rest upon. There is a loneliness in deep sorrow, to which God only can draw near. Its prayer is emphatically "the prayer of a lonely heart." Alone, the mind is wrestling with the great problem of calamity; and the solution, it asks from the infinite providence of heaven. Did I not rightly say, then, that calamity directly leads us to God; and that the tendency, so apparent in the mind of Job, to lift itself up to that exalted theme of contemplation, was natural? And it is natural too that the one book of affliction given us in the holy record, the one book wholly devoted to that subject, is, throughout and almost entirely, a meditation on God.

I wish to speak, in the present season of meditation, of this tendency of the mind, amidst the trials and distresses of life, to things superior to itself, and especially to the Supreme Being. It is not affliction of which I am to speak, but of that to which it leads. My theme is, the natural aspiration of humanity to things above and beyond it, and the revealings from above to that aspiration; it is in other words, the call of humanity and the answer to it. "I would order my cause before him," says Job, "I would know the words he would answer me."

There are many things in us, of which we are not distinctly conscious; and it is one office of every great ministration to human nature, whether its vehicle be the pen, the pencil, or the tongue, to waken that slumbering consciousness into life. And so do I think, that it is one office of the pulpit. That inmost consciousness, were it called forth from the dim cells in the soul, where it sleeps; how instantly would it turn

to a waking and spiritual reality, that life, which is now to many, a state so dull and worldly, so uninteresting and unprofitable!

How it should be such to any, seems to me, I confess, a thing almost inconceivable. It may be because my life is, as I may say, professionally a meditation upon themes of the most spiritual and quickening interest. Certainly I do not lay any claim to superior purity, for seeming to myself to see things as they are. But surely, this life, instead of being anything negative or indifferent, instead of being anything dull and trivial, seems to me I was ready to say, as if it were bound up with mystery, and agony, and rapture. Yes, rapture as well as agony; the rapture of love, of reciprocated affection, of hope, of joy, of prayer; and the agony of pain, of loss, of bereavement; and over all their strugglings, the dark cloud of mystery. If any one is unconscious of the intensity and awfulness of this life within him, I believe it is because he does not know what he is all the while feeling. Health and sickness, joy and sorrow, success and disappointment, life and death, are familiar words upon his lips, and he does not know to what depths they point within him. It is just as a man may live unconscious that there is anything unusual about him, in this age of unprecedented excitement; in this very crisis of the world's story.

Indeed a man seems never to know what any thing means, till he has lost it; and this, I suppose, is the reason why losses, vanishings away of things, are among the teachings of this world of shadows. The substance indeed teacheth; but the vacuity whence it has disappeared, yet more. Many an organ, many a nerve and fibre in our bodily frame, performs its silent part for years, and leaves us almost or quite uncon