path, sometimes wholly discouraged, ― often indifferent, and with little or no definite aim in your spiritual life. Sometimes you have felt a sort of pride in hiding your better feelings under the mask of coldness or indifference ; sometimes, by a frivolous manner, or a light, careless word, you have sought to conceal those secret convictions that would not let you rest in complacent ease and self-satisfaction; and sometimes, too, you have sincerely and earnestly longed for some true Christian friend to whom you might express your dissatisfaction and your secret anxiety, some one who would truly sympathize with you and aid you.

To meet such longings, to supply so far as I may the place of a personal counsellor and friend, to lead you to a better understanding of your true position, of your personal relation to God and to Christ, and to point out to you your only true path of life, in a child-like obedience and a Christian faith and trust, will be my single and sincere endeavor.

If at any time my words may not seem applicable to your immediate state of mind, your own judgment will point out the true course of thought and inquiry; remembering that, while the great facts of a spiritual experience are ever one and the same, they are also modified according to the peculiar mental habits, native dispositions, and natural temperament of the individual.

Let me beg you, then, not to adopt my conclusions, or to trust my guidance alone; but by a prayerful study of the Word of Truth, as applicable to your own heart and character, may you be led to the one only living Fountain of Life and Peace.

LETTER II.

INWARD DISSATISFACTION AND UNEASINESS.

THE state of your mind, my dear friend, as revealed in your welcome letter, is probably not so strange and peculiar as you seem to imagine; for the same restlessness, the same dissatisfaction, the same uneasy longings and disquiets, the same anxious fears and trembling hopes, have, in some form, been felt by every soul that has been roused, even for a little season, to a sense of its spiritual needs.

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Unless the child has been educated under the purest Christian influences, and in early youth has given the heart to God and to Christ, less the new birth into the spiritual life, the birth of the immortal desires and affections, has been simultaneous with the growth and development of that which is merely earthly and perishable, the season must come when questions such as these force themselves upon the soul with irresistible power: "What am I, and whither do I tend? For what purpose am I living? What is my trust for the present, and what my only

INWARD DISSATISFACTION AND UNEASINESS. 5

true hope for the future? Have I any sure foundation of faith? Know I, from experience, aught of that life over which death hath no power? Do I really believe in God, in Christ, in immortality? What is the meaning of salvation through Christ, and of the kingdom of heaven being within?"

No matter how pure and fair the life to outward seeming, no matter what has been the judgment of partial friends or careless observers, if the soul is not conscious of a personal interest in divine things, if it feels that it is not one with Christ, and through him reconciled to the Father, if it knows nothing from its own experience of the love of a Saviour, and of the Divine holiness and compassion manifested in and through him, then must there be discontent, dissatisfaction, uneasiness. Be sure there is that within you which will make you restless, and which must make you restless, until you find rest in God. Through a personal acceptance of the Redeemer alone, will you find peace.

But you say: "I do long, and at times earnestly long, for a more consistent, purer, higher life than I am now leading. What is merely outward does not and cannot satisfy me. Health, friends, the comforts of life, intellectual pursuits, the stimulus of conscious mental progress, the rewards of faithful industry, all such blessings are no unworthy sources of

happiness; yet in seasons of any peculiar trial or temptation, or in hours of solitude and selfrecollection, I find they utterly fail me. There is a deeper life concealed from human view, of which at such times I am conscious; there are wants which the common occupations or pleasures or intercourse of the day do not and cannot satisfy.

"I turn to the pages of the New Testament, and as I read there the glowing words of the Apostles, expressive of a living faith in Christ, of a love stronger than death, of a love that casteth out all fear, as I hear them speak of a life hid with Christ in God, of longing to depart and to be with Christ, — I feel that I have not yet learned even the alphabet of religious truth. I believe in Christ, that is, intellectually I believe in him; but I do not feel my personal relation to him as a Saviour and Redeemer. I admire the purity of his life; I see something of the greatness of his mission, and reverence his selfsacrificing love, and the tenderness of his compassion; but when he speaks of himself as the only Way, Truth, and Life,'-when he says, 'No man cometh unto the Father but by me,' 'I am the Resurrection and the Life,' when the Apostle emphatically declares of Christ, that there is no other name under heaven, given among men, whereby we can be saved, I feel that there is a meaning in such words which I

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