To suffer, therefore, is to triumph; to be distressed, is our glorious privilege; to "be weary and heavy-laden," is the only way to rest and happiness! Sure I am, that there are many here, who can bear witness to this great and awful truth; who can say with the Psalmist, "It is good for me that I have been afflicted." My God hath manifested his love in all my sufferings. I should never have come to the knowledge of his Truth; I should never have experienced the Light of his Grace; I should never have overcome the world, abandoned its delusive prospects, and gained a sure and everlasting inheritance; had not my GOD made this very world to frown upon me, had he not beset me with its troubles behind and before, and by making me deeply sensible of its evil, taught me to despise even its good. Thus, and thus alone, "the world is the Christian's," because he knows, that every thing in it, under the administration of his BLESSED REDEEMER, is made subservient to his real happiness, which he is convinced is more effectually promoted by its storms than by its calms, by its frowns than by its smiles. And if "the world" is thus his, by particular privilege, consequently "the Life" which he lives in it must be so too. The vicissitudes of life arise from the natural instability of worldly enjoyments: but even this instability the believer knows to be under the immediate Guidance of ALMIGHTY LOVE. The real enjoyment of life depends upon the temper and disposition of mind, with which its vicissitudes are received. The Christian, therefore, who knows, that "not an hair of his head can fall to the ground without his Heavenly Father," and whose will is secretly resigned to his Father's, meekly and patiently, daily and hourly giving himself up to his sovereign disposal, he alone can be said to have a true enjoyment of life.--In sickness and in health, in prosperity and in adversity, he alike beholds the hand of his REDEEMER opening to him, by these various dispensations, the way to never-ending rest; unfolding his misery by nature, and his happiness by Grace, and rendering every change of outward life instrumental to some blessed change in the life of his inward and spiritual man.