it: you have been convinced of your lost state; you have felt the slavery of sin and the Devil; you have felt the bondage of the Law; you have seen the Redeemer making an atonement for sinners: your faith has received this; your hope has enjoyed this; your love has been led out to him in sweet return; and though you still felt yourself a sinner, yet your mind was happy in Jesus, his glorious Person, and his great Work. Here you sung with Moses and Miriam, with gospel ministers and people, _The Lord is my strength and my song_, _he also is become my salvation_, _and I will exalt him_. But your note was soon changed, for you presently found yourself in the wilderness of fears, lest you had been deluded, and lest you had presumed—lest your grief had been like Esau’s, and your joys the raptures of a way-side hearer; quite forgetting that that religion which comes from God, always leads to God, as our salvation and our eternal all. This was certainly your experience; then why doubt the reality of it? The commandment has gone forth, that you, for wise and God-glorifying purposes, should pitch your tent at Marah; here you must taste of the bitter cup of sorrow. This will only endear the Tree of Life to you, who was cut down, and cast into deeper waters than you can possibly go into; and will lead your faith to apprehend, that though your waters are deep and bitter, yet faith tastes them sweet, by virtue of Christ’s removing the curse— Thus believing we rejoice, To see the curse removed. Your path may indeed be hard and thorny, but, bless God, there is no curse in it; let this console your mind, I am sure it will, if the Holy Spirit gives you power to believe it. Your present experience of darkness, guilt, deadness, bondage, contraction of spirit, and great stupor, are the days of evil that Solomon speaks of, which are many, but must at last issue in an exceeding and an eternal weight of glory. But seeing such are the days that must come on the followers of the dear Saviour, how truly important, and how highly interesting that exhortation in the twelfth of Ecclesiastes, _Remember now thy Creator_, _in the days of thy youth_, _while the evil days come not_, _and the years draw nigh_, _wherein thou shalt say I have no pleasure in them_. Solomon could well talk of these things, for he had a wonderful share of them, and wrote the whole Book of Ecclesiastes upon the subject. The word is said by some, to mean the Preacher, but others think it signifies Restoration to the Church. It was also written by him in his old age, after his recovery from backsliding; as such it must be a precious treasure in the hands of a poor sinner, who knows the plague of his heart, the weakness of human nature, the inconstancy and mutability of all transitory things, of all terrestial objects.