Consider the many blessings we have to acknowledge as bestowed upon our country. During the earliest of these intervals fixed for numbering the people, of which we have now reached the sixth, we were engaged in destructive wars, always a source of the most extensive misery and crime. And ever, as the period came round for enrolling our living population, there was an allowance to be made for the losses it had suffered of multitudes who had passed into the grave before their full time, in foreign lands, amidst the horrors of the battlefield or the naval fight, their last hours wanting all the solace of domestic endearment or spiritual comfort. But we have now been mercifully spared for nearly forty years from any general or continued war. _Ten years more_ of almost unbroken peace, or of peace broken only in the remoter dependencies of the empire, have passed over us. And very few of our countrymen, comparatively with other times, have had their lives cut short by a scourge to which the pride and covetousness of mankind are always urging them, but which it may be hoped the God of love and peace, in answer to the prayers of His servants, will continue still to restrain. It was a feeling of the terrors of that scourge which drew from David the affecting entreaty recorded in the chapter before us: “_Let us fall now into the hands of the Lord_; _for his mercies are great_: _and let us not fall into the hands of man_.” {13} And if it cannot equally be said that our land has been spared from the visitation of pestilence, if it has pleased God, within the last ten years, to send again among us that fearful judgment, what cause had we for thankfulness that even in the midst of that judgment He remembered mercy, and that in the most direct answer to prevailing prayer that we have ever witnessed, He caused the disorder to cease even at the time when it seemed to be defying all human means of restraining it.