Men who look no farther than the present scene, may, with less glaring inconsistency, vent their vexation in accusing the blindness and partiality of fate, which has held their eminent talents and their peculiar merits so long under the veil of obscurity; but those who acknowledge at once a disposing providence and a future life, might surely find considerations proper for imposing silence upon such murmurings of disappointed ambition. Let it be granted to a man that his vanity does not deceive him, when he complains that adverse fortune has prevented his entering the very course upon which nature fitted him to shine, and has, with unrelenting severity, confined him, year after year, to a drudgery in which he was not qualified to win even a common measure of success: all this may be true; but if the complainant be a Christian, he cannot find it difficult to admit that this clashing of his fortune with his capacities, or his tastes, may have been the very exercise necessary to ensure his ultimate welfare. Who will deny that the reasons of the divine conduct towards those who are in training for an endless course must always lie at an infinite distance beyond the range of created vision? Who shall venture even to surmise what course of events may best foster the germ of an imperishable life; or who conjecture what contraventions of the hopes and interests of an individual may find their reasons and necessity somewhere in the wide universe of consequences incalculably remote? Whether the promise "that all things shall work together for good to those who love God," is to be accomplished by perpetual sunshine or by incessant storms, no one can anticipate in his own case: or if any one were excepted, it must be the enthusiast himself, who might almost with certainty calculate upon receiving a dispensation the very reverse of that which it has been the leading error of his life to anticipate. He might thus calculate, both because his expectations are in themselves exorbitant and improbable, and because the presumptuous temper from which they spring loudly calls for the rebuke of heaven. * * * * *