ford is gathered into my present cup; it is full and runs
over with earthly good, and a large measure of health to enjoy it.
Moral temporals are also mine in no common degree, friendship, society
at my choice, and respectability in it. Rich means of grace within my
reach, my Bible, and books of every kind and great variety at my hand,
of instruction and of devotion. Mine eyes see my teachers, and my
judgment approves their doctrine as corresponding with that sure word
of testimony given me as the test of all human writings. Yet it is a
day of darkness and of gloom.

"'Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice
of his servant, that walketh in darkness and hath no light? Let him
trust in the name of the Lord and stay upon his God.' Isa. 50:10.

"To trust in the name of the Lord and to stay myself upon my God
is still my privilege, and though with little life and little comfort,
my experience. My mind is so desultory! My Bible, and helps derived
from men's deductions and experiences, seem useless; they are not
blessed as means to fix my heart; trifles of every sort pass and
repass often; while my eyes read the words, my mind is gone in a dream
on some other subject; my heart remains unimpressed, my mind
uninformed; the same in prayer, especially in secret and in the
family; less so in the sanctuary.

"I seem, as to apprehension, left to my own dark, dismal, carnal
self; naked faith on the finished work of my Redeemer is all that
supports me; and that as a bare preventive of fear and source of a
hope that 'I shall yet praise Him who is the health of my countenance
and my God.' I know his covenant stands fast, I have taken hold of it;
I do at this cold and stupid moment place my confidence in it. Christ
is God's covenant, God's gift to sinners; I believe it; he is the Lamb
of God, which taketh away the sin of the world; I believe it; I
believe on the Son for all the purposes for which God has sent him
into the world; therefore I have everlasting life; I believe the
record that God gave of his Son; that God hath given to me eternal
life, and this life is in his Son, not in me, but in union with him.
'He that hath the Son hath life; he that hath not the Son, hath
not life.' John 5.

"I thank thee, my God, that thou hast not left me to cast away my
confidence in Christ. I have life in him, and no life but as I have it
from him. Thou seest how it is with me. Thou art my reconciled Fath