but in how many instances is this merciful provision made; and you will find it very useful, in a kind but not a dictatorial manner, to point out such causes for gratitude and contentment. If you meet with a poor woman who can only spell the Word of God, encourage her to proceed in her efforts to improve, and tell her of old "Catherine Prescott," who learned to read when at the advanced age of one hundred years—and whose very attempts to improve was really met by the Holy Spirit's blessing. Whilst dwelling upon EACH WORD, some precious portion of Divine truth seemed to be brought to her mind.

We are often led to admire God's system of compensation in his natural productions; and I think it is not less striking in his providential and gracious dealings with his people. The poor may not be able to enter into the most sublime ideas, but I believe that they often feel the force and the value of many words which, from our facility in reading, we pass over. This is an enjoyment and benefit which some of our laborious

translators are permitted to share with them. Dr. Buchanan observed to a friend, that he had expected beforehand that his work would prove irksome to him, but "no," he added,

every fresh perusal of the sacred page seems to unveil new beauties." In this enjoyment, therefore, the rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, may meet. Having extended this letter to an unusual length, I must reserve a few hints connected with your Scriptural reading to the poor for another opportunity, and would only add, take care that every thing you lend or say may tend to increase the desire for the 66 Word of Life." May you daily know more of the privilege of working for God and with God whilst you have strength to do it; and when laid aside by Him, rest assured that you will abundantly realize the blessed promises contained in the 2nd and 3rd verses of the 41st Psalm.

Believe me, your attached friend,
Bristol, August 12, 1846.

WITHIN the last twenty-five years great revolutions have occurred in the East, affecting, in a peculiar manner, the future destiny of the followers of Mohammed, and distinctly marking the gradual advancement of the Christian power. Turkey has been deprived of Greece, after a fearful and sanguinary struggle, and the land of warriors and sages has become sovereign and independent. Egypt conquered and occupied Syria, and the fierce Pacha had thrown off allegiance to the Sultan. Menaced, however, by the interference of European powers, Mehemet Ali was compelled to submit to the Commander of the Faithful, re-conveying Syria to Turkey, and was content to accept the hereditary possession of Egypt.

Russia has assailed the wandering hordes of the Caucasus. England

has had various contests with the native princes of India, and has waged war with China. The issue of these contests in Asia has been marked with singular success, and evidently indicates the progressive power of the Christian governments in that interesting quarter of the globe. France has carried its victorious arms through the north of Africa. Russia, with a steady glance and firm step, approaches Turkey in Europe, and when her railroads are completed to the Black Sea, will pour in her Cossacks from the Don and the Vistula, and Constantinople will be occupied by the descendants of the Tartar Dynasty, and all Turkey in Europe united to Greece, will constitute either an independent empire, or be occupied by Russia, who, with one arm on the Mediterranean, and the other on the North Sea, will nearly embrace all

Europe. The counterbalance of this gigantic power will be a firm and liberal union of Austria with all Italy and the Roman States down to the borders of Gaul-but the revolution will not end here. England must possess Egypt, as affording the only secure route to her possessions in India through the Red Sea; then Palestine thus placed between the Russian possessions and Egypt, reverts to its legitimate proprietors, and for the safety of surrounding nations, a powerful, wealthy, independent, and enterprising people, are placed there by and with the consent of the Christian powers; and with their aid and agency, the land of Israel passes once more into the possession of the descendants of Abraham. The ports of the Mediterranean will be again opened to the busy hum of commerce, the fields will again bear the fruitful harvest, and the Christian and the Jew will, together on Mount Zion, raise their voices in praise of Him, whose covenant with Abraham was to endure for ever, and in whose seed all the nations of the earth are to be blessed.

This is our destiny. Every attempt to colonize the Jews in other countries has failed their eyes have steadily rested on their beloved Jerusalem, and they have said, "The time will come, the promise will be fulfilled !"

The Jews are in a most favourable position to repossess themselves of the Promised Land, and organize a free and liberal government. In Poland, Moldavia, Wallachia, on the Rhine and Danube, and wherever the illiberality of the governments has not interposed obstacles, they are practical farmers. Agriculture was once their only natural employment. The land is now desolate, according to the prediction of the prophets, but it is full of hope and promise. The soil is rich, loamy, and everywhere indicates fruitfulness, and the magni

ficent cedars of Lebanon show the strength of the soil on the highest elevations. The climate is mild and salubrious, and double crops in the low lands may be annually anticipated. Everything is produced in the greatest variety; wheat, barley, rye, corn, oats, and the cotton plant in great abundance. The sugar cane is cultivated with success; tobacco grows plentifully on the mountains, indigo is produced in abundance on the banks of the Jordan; olives and olive oil are everywhere found, the mulberry almost grows wild, out of which the most beautiful silk is made; grapes of the largest kind flourish everywhere ; cochineal is produced in abundance on the coast, and can be most profitably cultivated. The coffee tree grows almost spontaneously, and oranges, figs, dates, pomegranates, peaches, apples, plums, nectarines, pine-apples, and all the tropical fruits known to us, flourish everywhere about Syria. The several ports in the Mediterranean which formerly carried on a most valuable commerce, can be advantageously re-occupied. Manufactures of wool, cotton, and silk, could furnish all the Levant and the islands of the Mediterranean with useful fabrics. In a circumference within twenty days' travel of the Holy City, two millions of Jews reside. Of the two and a half tribes which moved East of the transjordanic cities, Judah and Benjamin and half Manasseh, I compute the number in every part of the world as exceeding six millions. Of the missing nine and a half tribes, part of which are in Turkey, China, Hindostan, Persia, and on this continent, it is impossible to ascertain the numerical force. Many only retain the strict observance of the Mosaic laws, rejecting the Talmud and Commentaries; others in Syria, Egypt, and Turkey, are rigid observers of the ceremonies.

EVERYTHING that occurs on the page of inspiration is not necessarily to be assumed to be correct and wise. It is, of course, correct as a record of what has passed; but it may be the record of the sayings or doings of an unwise, an ignorant, or an unholy man, and consequently a sentiment so recorded as having been uttered, does not necessarily demand our implicit approval. This is eminently the case with the moral and theological teaching of Job's friends; and is often, in the reading of that book, not sufficiently considered. Both he and his friends were strangely ignorant of the real character of God's government, and consequently very much misled as to the complicated case before them; and consequently it often happened that while, on both sides, they advanced sentiments in argumentative opposition to each other, it could not be denied that each of such statements contained a general or abstract truth, that the remark was founded on fact and actual observation; but that it was not true as viewed in direct reference to the case in which they were all interested. For instance, when Bildad affirms that "the hypocrite's hope shall perish," he puts forth an unquestionable truth; but if he means to affirm by that, that the extraordinary affliction which had bowed down his friend to the dust, was necessarily a preliminary part and parcel of that "perishing," he is altogether mistaken. And on the other hand, when Job says to God, "thou knowest that I am not wicked," he is entitled so to protest in respect to the charge of hypocrisy brought against him by his friends; but if he means to deny an amount of moral error which would justify his trials, he is then mistaken both as to the holiness of God, and his own shortcomings.

This is peculiarly the case with one opinion unhesitatingly advanced by Zophar the Naamathite. He stands over his afflicted and agonized acquaintance: he sees him broken down to the lowest depths of sorrow, suddenly deprived of his wealth, bereft of his children, visited with a loath

some disease, and left even by his wife, to scrape his sorely afflicted frame with a potsherd; and in his estimate of God's mode of government over men, he ventures in the most unqualified manner to affirm, "Know thou that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth." This was in a great measure a mistaken and an unfeeling judgment; and was calculated not to lead Job towards a wiser and more enlightened view of God's dealings with him, but to call up the feeling of resistance to chastenings which, thus falsely interpreted, might appear to be unjust; and would wake up, in this truly good man, the lingering remnants of a self-justifying spirit.

The mind of Zophar was of a peculiar class. It was a narrow and pharisaical mind, brought in a great measure under the pious, natural fear of God; but, at the same time, taking very limited and unenlightened views of his providential discipline. He could not see, in the government of the great God, whom he feared, beyond the direct connexion between present affliction and actual sin, between virtue and present immediate happiness; and consequently his estimate of men's moral deserts was made on the ground of the amount of their sorrows now, as compared with the sorrows of other men. There are men in the world of a widely different character; who would draw a very opposite, but equally erroneous, conclusion from such an instance of remarkable misfortune. They would say, we have known this man in his day of prosperity. He was most undoubtedly, as men go in general, a man of integrity. We never found him tripping. His dealings were upright, his benevolence was doubted. In the common relations of life he was all that could be expected; and yet see what overwhelming trials are come upon him; what an entire want of congruity there is between his real merits and his afflictions! How manifestly man is the creature of fortuitous influences, driven about by vagrant, ungovernable, and

un

unmeaning storms. They tell us that there is a reward for the righteous, but who can look at the trials of Job and believe it? We believe that the wise dieth as the fool, and that time and chance happeneth to all men, and that as to the control of a governing mind of wisdom and equity, regulating in providence the affairs of men, it does not exist." It would answer no purpose now, in reply to their infidel surmises, when the case of Job is matter of record, to appeal to the close of his history, for it would be easy for them to put it aside by the reply, “Why, the whole is only a fiction." Nor would it have been conclusive with such minds to appeal, in that day, to the actual and undoubted issue of his trial; because they would be ready with the answer, "This is only another turn of the wheel, in which the prosperous close is as fortuitous and inexplicable as the intervening distress."

But if

such men would calmly look to the end of things in a truly philosophic spirit, and draw a justifiable induction from a great variety of cases, they would find an ample proof coming forth, of the righteous government of God. They would learn that any other impression originates in a wilful leaning to a contrary notion, and an unjust sustaining of that notion by a few insulated, not accurately examined, or well understood cases. And after all, the fact of the divine government is not to be gathered by fallible men from their inadequate scanning of his moral operations; but by a reasonable submission of the mind to the whole system of impression and instruction, by which the infinitely wise and gracious God has chosen to bring back sinful and alienated man to himself. The infidelity of the heart is the natural result of man's moral blindness; and God has chosen his own way of silencing and removing it. Let men place themselves in a right position, and before the right use of means it vanishes. "For the invisible things of God, viz., his eternal power and Godhead, may be clearly seen, being understood by the things which are made, so that they are without excuse. ""*

* It is deeply distressing to observe the

But to a mind of Zophar's stamp no such sceptical thought would arise; and whatever be the kind of errors to which men of his class are liable, it is a mercy indeed to be free from the distressing suggestion, "There is no God!" and from the habit of looking out greedily for those anomalies, or at least seeming anomalies, which might go to confirm the sad impression, and to spread over the darkness of the suspicion a yet darker shade!

With such men as Zophar, the fact of the divine government is thoroughly established. They have no doubt of it. Their error is in the narrow view which they take of it. They regard God as a rigid lawgiver, who exacts from his creatures to the full amount of their ability, and punishes with unbending severity every deviation from the given rule. And doubtless this view of the divine justice as a part of the divine character is very important; but if this is to be the whole absorbing notion of deity, it will fall very far short of what God has been to man ever since his fall, by a distinct and unmistakeable revelation. And it is this want of appreciation of the whole character and dealing of God with man, as revealed, that leads such men as moralists and theologians into error.

Acting upon his assumed notion of God's providence, Zophar concluded the peculiar guilt of Job from the peculiar severity of his chastenings. He assumed that God metes out suffering now in actual retributive visitation for guilt; and seeing that his friend was now lying under a heavier chastisement than fell to the common lot of men, he judged that there had been, as the call for it, a peculiar depth of hypocritical depravity of some kind or other which he

extent to which infidel works of the Voltaire school are spread at low prices among the people, the chief characteristic of them being an ingenious effort to find out apparent discrepancies in the Scriptures, as an ostensible excuse for putting them aside, and escaping the powerful appeal which their awful statements of truth make to the conscience and the heart. This is a

desperate game, but especially when it is played merely as a business speculation.

had never been able to detect; and misled by his theory to this false conclusion, he proceeds to press this conviction on the bruised and agonized spirit of the sufferer, "Know, therefore, that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth," i. e., you have led such a sinful life, as compared with other men, that even now God is not punishing you as you deserve, beyond the sufferings of other men.

But how very unwarrantable is this course! To what an unjust estimate of the comparative merits of individuals it would lead! And how entirely it is condemned by our blessed Lord, who knows intimately the principles of the divine providence, when he said, " Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered such things? I tell you nay." He decries at once the propriety of the course which Zophar took, of measuring a man's comparative guilt by the amount of his afflictions. In fact, to do so is to lose sight of the great principle on which God has ever proceeded since the world was a fallen one, to exercise his right as a sovereign to send trial and chastening where he will, for the profit of men's souls "that they may be partakers of his holiness."

This is so decidedly a marking principle of the divine procedure, that in both the earlier and later Scriptures it is laid down very plainly, "My Son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him. For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons.' And this principle goes so far to mark God's dealings, and to characterize his people, that St. Paul says, "If ye be without chastening, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards and not sons. So that if Zophar had rightly understood the aspect of the case before him, he would have been probably more correct in concluding against his own religious state, inasmuch as he was without chastening, than against that of his friend because he was prostrate in the valley of humiliation.

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But what an uncharitable and censorious spirit would be cultivated, if we were authorized to walk through a world of sorrow and suffering, and measure out our estimate of moral worth by men's trials and sufferings, either in their persons or their circumstance. Thank God, the complicated web of his providence completely baffles and confounds any such attempts. Whatever measure of retributive visitation enters now into the divine government, is not that coarse and readily distinguishable thing, that the untouched and unsuffering man can walk in a self-righteous spirit through the wards of the great hospital, and deal out condemnation upon his fellows according to the proportion of their sorrows. Alas! he will find ungodly men flourishing for a time like a green bay tree; he will find the ripening saint the tenant of a poorhouse, with a soul rapidly preparing, in the fulness of experience and sanctifying grace, to take wing for the world of perfection. Yet the rule of Zophar would lead him to view the one with approbation because he was prosperous; and to say to the other, "If thou wert pure and upright, surely now he would awake for thee, and make the habitation of thy righteousness prosper." And such is the influence of self-love, that we are disposed thus to act and conclude even against the internal conviction of our own minds; for there must be within, a consciousness that the rule by which we would judge others, does not hold with respect to ourselves; for that 66 God has not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.” And surely we are bound to infer, that if, in our own case, we are compelled conscientiously to admit that our trials would not be a fair measure of our sins-a case which is fully and fairly open to us, we are not warranted to apply the principle in judging of others, when so many elements of consideration may come in of which we know nothing; and where the measure of guilt, not having been seen by us, must be altogether a matter of conjecture. How utterly unknown to Zophar, in his scanning the moral merit of his friend, was that mysterious scene in