VI.

Saved from Destruction.

I.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not any of His benefits who redeemed thy life from destruction, and guarded thee around with kindness and tender mercies.-Psalms ciii. 2, 4.

UT there is yet another way in which the "saving of life from destruction " may be understood. We call to mind the great anxieties of early manhood to follow some pursuit and to do some particular work in the world, and how often nothing but disappointment has followed. Either the chosen pursuit was frustrated and made impossible by uncontrollable circumstance; or, when undertaken, it has turned out to be a wretched failure. Ah! Who can measure the sadness, the despondency of those poor hearts who, having put the fruit of their labor to their lips, find nothing inside but dust and ashes. He is wont to think of his life and energies as thrown away, as destroyed. He knows, or thinks he knows, what he is specially fitted for, and yet his path thereto has been effectually barred, and he has been compelled to take up quite another and, as he feels, a lower occupation altogether. Yet how often such an one has found, on looking back, that his life has not been destroyed, but saved from destruction; that he has been of great use and value to his family and his fellow-men in that lower sphere of activity which he was compelled to adopt. CHARLES VOYSEY.

HALL we murmur, shall we mourn?
Is our life quite, quite forlorn?

Or, in railing at our fate,

Do we seize our joys too late?

Ever will we think our Lord

Has man's prayers and cries ignored.
Never will we understand

Life is shaped by His kind hand.

Should we all His wisdom know
Then our hearts would humble grow;
Should we feel His ways are best,
Then our souls would know true rest.

VII.

N

Saved from Destruction.

II.

He sent His word and healed them; and delivered them from their destruction.-Psalms cvii. 20.

ND here I must mention another class of disappointed lives, which move my deepest sympathy. Men, and women too, have naturally looked forward with beaming hope to the full fruition of their lives in marriage and family love. This is one of the holiest and purest desires which a loving God has implanted in the human breast. And yet we know how sadly, how wofully, this hope has been blighted; how a most devoted affection has been bestowed on an unworthy object, how trusting hearts have been blighted by faith

lessness and desertion; and alas! sometimes the cold and cruel hand of Death has smitten asunder the loving pair, and sentenced one or the other to the most utter desolation. Can we not forgive such souls when they cry out that their lives have been wrecked, have been destroyed? And yet, the world is full of instances in which these widowed and desolate souls have risen out of the ashes of their despair and led lives of surpassing beauty and loving kindness. God has sent them to bless, comfort and cherish some aged and enfeebled parent, some invalid brother or sister, or has sent some orphaned or outcast children to whom they could be a mother or a father. I have cases in my mind at this moment where these so-called blighted or blasted lives have been not only saved from destruction, but made radiant and glorious by heroic devotion; when the wealth of love, which might have all been poured forth on husband, or wife, or children, has been bestowed on kindred, and even on strangers, whose lives would have been destroyed through lack of it.

VIII.

Saved from Destruction.

III.

I said in my haste: I am cut off from Thine eyes; nevertheless Thou heardest the voice of my supplications.

Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord.— Psalms xxxi. 22, 24.

ND when we pass out of ourselves and the souls which He has thus enriched and fortified, we meet the angels of His saving grace in the men, women and children by whom we are surrounded. Think for one moment of the mercies and blessings of family life and love, of the healing, saving influences of daily contact with those who dearly love us, who pray for us, who mourn over our sin and frailty, who are patient with our infirmity, who are good and kind to us, although we do not fully deserve it, who return us good for our evil, and forgive our trespasses even after we are grown weary of asking to be forgiven; who think of us in the wakeful nights, and when we are far away sailing on distant seas or travelling amid the unknown and ghastly perils of foreign climes; the dear ones whose love has saved us from shameful sin a hundred times over, and whom the God of Love has set around on every side to protect us from ourselves.

CHARLES VOYSEY.

WHEN all Thy mercies, O my God,

My rising soul surveys,

Transported with the view, I'm lost
In wonder, love and praise.

Ten thousand thousand precious gifts

My daily thanks employ;

Nor is the least a cheerful heart,

That tastes those gifts with joy.

IX.

The Mother's tear.

And Hagar went and sat her down, over against Ishmael, a good way off. . . for she said: Let me not see the death of the child; and she sat over against him and lifted up her voice and wept.— Genesis xxi. 16.

BLESSED be the tear that sadly rolled
For me, O mother! down thy sacred cheek;
That with a silent fervor did bespeak

A fonder tale than language ever told;

And poured such balm upon my spirit, weak
And wounded in a world so harsh and cold,
As that wherewith an angel would uphold

Those, that astray, heaven's holy guidance seek.
And though it passed away, and, soon as shed
Seemed ever lost, to vanish from thine eye,
Yet only to the dearest store it fled

Of my remembrance, where it now doth lie, Like a thrice precious relic of the dead,

The chiefest jewel of its treasury.

ROBERT Roscoe.