Holy One you have received as a mere matter of course, with no thought of the Giver, no grateful recognition of the hand that strews. your daily path with blessings. From day to day, you have enjoyed the rich bounties of his kind providence, forgetting Him in whom alone you live and move, and have your whole being. Is not such ingratitude sin? How often, too, have your seasons of devotion been either wholly neglected, or hurried through, because some engagement was to be fulfilled, some pleasure to be enjoyed, some recitation to be prepared, or some business to be accomplished, too important to be postponed! But have you ever questioned the relative importance of these things in the sight of God?

How often have you entered upon the untried scenes of a new day, refreshed by peaceful slumber, and renovated in every faculty, without one ascription of praise and thanksgiving, one petition for heavenly strength, guidance, and protection! And when the duties and cares and enjoyments of the day have closed, how often have you yielded your powers to the calm insensibility of repose, without one thought of Him who compasses your path and your lying down, who besets you behind and before, and even lays his hand upon you in infinite and tender compassion, that you may turn and look to him!

This forgetfulness of God, this cold indiffer

2

ence,

is not this sin? A child to forget his parent, to live in the Father's house, unmindful of the Father's presence, - is it not strange, unnatural, sinful?

But you say, or rather you have often secretly felt, that God was altogether too merciful to call you to any stringent account for your failures or short-comings; that he would never exercise any retributive justice upon a character on the whole so moral and correct as your own. Taking the sublime revelation, that God is Love, and making it a sort of covert for your low aims and unspiritual purposes, you have never fathomed its deep and vast significance, nor remembered that justice is a part of love, and that perfect holiness is an essential attribute of the Almighty. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and because you know so little of the Divine attributes, you have felt as if all were well with you, forgetting that Immaculate Purity, before which the very heavens are not clean.

This deep sense of the Divine holiness, of the strict requirements of his law, and of your own sins, omissions, and short-comings, can alone lead you to feel your personal need of the Saviour. You may admire his example, you may wonder at his miracles, you may rejoice in his acts of beneficence, you may weep over his sufferings, or exult in his glory; but you will not enter into

tender sympathy or loving communion with him, until you are brought to feel a personal interest in his spirit; until you feel your need of one who shall assure you of pardon and reconciliation, of one in whose strength your weakness shall find support, of one in whose compassionate regard and affection the secret yearnings of your soul shall alone be satisfied. After all your indifference, forgetfulness, and negligence, the dark background of conscious sin, unworthiness, and alienation from God must first display the radiant image of the cross.

You reply, that you do believe in the law of God, that you wish to feel thus, and that, at times, you truly desire to love Christ and to be his disciple; but you are so often utterly indifferent, the truths of religion seem so unreal, that you cannot grasp them, nor give them in your mind the weight which you know belongs to them.

Such feelings are the necessary result of much of your past unfaithfulness and negligence; of having often grieved away the Spirit, and closed your heart to the pleadings of the Divine voice. But I earnestly entreat you, look no longer to anything outward as the cause of your present disquiet. The difficulty is within. The evil is there alone. God's voice is again speaking to you. Quench not the Spirit. Listen to its monitions, and may it guide you to Christ, the Way and the Life.

'My Father bids me come;

O, why do I delay?

He calls my wandering spirit home, And yet from him I stay.

"Father, the hindrance show

Which I have failed to see;

And let me now consent to know What keeps me far from thee.

"In me the hindrance lies;·

The fatal bar remove,

And let me see, in sweet surprise,

Thy full redeeming love."

LETTER IV.

NEED OF RECONCILIATION, AND OF A DISTINCT RELIGIOUS CHOICE.

scene.

You feel, my dear friend, and truly feel, that your character is not all that it should be, that your faith is that of the intellect rather than of the heart, subject to the fluctuations of each passing emotion or opinion, or changing outward You read, and now at length ponder for yourself the solemn words of Christ, "Except a man be born again, he cannot enter into the kingdom of Heaven," and you feel that, however fair your character may stand in the eyes of others, there has not been, deep in your soul, the firm, deliberate choice of Christ as your only Guide and Saviour, that the ruling desire and aim of your spirit has not been that of a child-like obedience to the Father. You know that

"The world can never give

The bliss for which you sigh,"

that neither outward success, nor luxurious living, nor intellectual attainments, nor engrossment