But while the thoughtless may deplore for an hour the irreparable loss they have sustained, the thoughtful few muse rather than weep; and in order to conceal from themselves the irreverence of their own repinings, exclaim—'How mysterious are the ways of heaven!' Yes; but in the present instance, what is mysterious? Not that human life should at all periods be liable to disease, or the human frame be always vulnerable; for these are conditions inseparable from the present constitution of our nature; and it is clear that nothing less than a perpetual miracle could exempt any one class of mankind from the common contingencies of physical life. The supposition of any such constant and manifest interposition, rendering a certain description of persons intactible by harm; would be impious as well as absurd. Nothing could suggest to a sane mind an idea of this sort, if it did not gain admittance in the train of those eager forecastings of the ways of God in which persons much addicted to religious meditation are prone to indulge, and which, though they may afford pleasure for a moment, are usually purchased at the cost of relapses into gloomy, or worse than gloomy discontents. There is a striking incongruity in the fact that the propensity to apply the equivocal term, mysterious, to sudden and afflictive events, like the one just specified, is indulged almost exclusively by the very persons whose professed principles furnish them with a sufficient explanation of such dispensations. If the present state were thought to comprise the beginning and the end of the human system, and if, at the same time, this system be attributed to the Supreme Intelligence, then indeed the prodigious waste and destruction which is continually taking place, not only of the germs of life, but of the rarest and of the most excellent specimens of divine art, is a solecism that must baffle every attempt at explanation. Let then the deist, who knows of nothing beyond death, talk of the mysteries of Providence; but let not the Christian, who is taught to think little of the present, and much of the future, use language of this sort. * * * * * A popular misunderstanding of the language of Scripture relative to the future state, has, perhaps, had great influence in enhancing the gloom and perplexity with which Christians are wont to think and speak of sudden and afflictive visitations of Providence.