But night overtakes the wanderer, and he is forced to halt and lie down under the protection of a juniper-tree. There his troubled thoughts dwell upon the past, and he revolves in his mind the complete failure of his mission to Samaria, the miracles which he had wrought, and the vengeance which was pursuing him. All was lost. 'Twas useless to undertake to preach more or to labor more for that idolatrous people. Disappointment has crowned his every exertion, and not a ray of hope shines from the future, to call back the request of the Tishbite that he may die. In his despair and anguish he mutters, "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life." He sleeps. But one of the ministering spirits is at his side, in this hour of desperate extremity. The prophet, at his touch, starts up and eats. The gnawings of hunger being partially allayed, he again sinks down to sleep, till again the angel touches him, and bids him eat the more; for he is not to die yet. He has not yet done his work; he must tread the wild crags of Horeb, and back to Ahab and Samaria, once more. "Arise and eat; for the journey is too great for thee." We must have a poor faculty of apprehending spiritual lessons, if we allow this narrative to pass without some practical instruction. We do not tax our imagination severely in order to see, in the person of Elijah, a representation of the child of God in seasons of depression and despair. Not unfrequently is he brought into the position of the prophet. Not at all times is he privileged to stand upon Zion, and to rejoice in hope. But a thousand circumstances in life conspire to disappoint his hopes and becloud his prospects, till he flees from his post, and is found far away under the juniper-tree in the wilderness. When the sanguine expectations which he indulged at the beginning of his discipleship, become one by one disappointed; when he finds that Christian experience is a far different affair from what he had conceived of; when straits and trials spring up around him at every turn of life, such as he had not counted on, and the work of grace in his heart seems, after all, to amount to nothing; when new and unlooked-for symptoms of corruption are daily brought to light, and the ardor of his first love is dampened by the checks and crosses that thicken around him--when thus his early dreams are dissipated, and his heart feels a sickness and a faintness come over it, do you not see that he is in the wilderness? Oh who has not sickened at the slow work of grace within him? Who has not marked the sad contrast between what he once said he would be, and what he is; and who has not felt the harassments of doubt and the vanity of his own strugglings, till he despaired of success, and fled like the prophet to the wilderness?