Let me ask, Has this been the result of thy woundings? Have they led thee from the "broken (leaky) cistern" to say, "All my springs are in THEE?" Remember affliction, worldly calamity, bereavement, have a twofold effect. It is a solemn alternative! They may drive thee nearer, they may drive thee farther from, thy God. They may drive thee down to the gushing stream, or farther up the cold, freezing mountain-side. The wounded hart of this Psalm, on receiving the sting of the arrow, might have plunged only deeper and deeper into the toils of the huntsmen, or the solitudes of the forest. It might have gone with its pining eye, and broken heart, and bleeding wound, to bury itself amid the withered leaves. How many there are whose afflictions seem to lead to this sad consequence; who, when mercies and blessings are removed, abandon themselves to sullen and morbid fretfulness; who, instead of bowing submissive to the hand that wounds and is able to heal, seem to feel as if they were denuded of their rights! Their language is the bitter reproach of Jonah--"_I do well to be angry, even unto death_." Muffling themselves in hardened unbelief, their wretched solace is that of despair--"_It is better for me to die than to live_." "_Blessed is the man that_ ENDURETH _temptation_," not who rushes away to pine, and bleed, and die;--or to feed still on husks and the garbage of the wilderness, but who makes the nobler resolve, "_I will arise and go to my Father_." Blessed is the man whose cry, like that of the child, is answered by his heavenly Parent bending over the cradle of his sorrow;--who feels, as the Psalmist did, that his gracious Father and God is never so near him as in a time of trial. "_When my spirit was overwhelmed,_ THEN THOU _knewest my path._" The bird of the desert is said to bury its head in the sand on the approach of its foes, and to abandon itself to destruction; but blessed is the man who rather is like the bird of the grove, the first twigs of whose nest have been ruthlessly pulled to pieces by the hand of violence. Hovering for a while over her pillaged home, she fills the wood with her plaintive lament, then soars away from the haunt of the destroyer to begin a fresh one, in a place of safety, on the top branch of some cedar of God!