ity, and such
accomplishments as man can administer: that as the fowls are fed and the
lilies clothed by Him whose hand made the air musical with the one, and
dressed the fields with the other, so is the human spirit nourished and
adorned by airs from heaven, which blow over the whole earth, and light
from the skies, which no hand is permitted to intercept. Parents know
not but that Providence may be substituting the noblest education for
the misteaching of intermediate guardians. It may possibly be so; but
if not, still there is appointed to every human being much training,
many privileges, which capricious fortune can neither give nor take
away. The father may sigh to see his boy condemned to the toil of the
loom, or the gossip and drudgery of the shop, when he would fain have
beheld him the ornament of a university; but he knows not whether a more
simple integrity, a loftier disinterestedness, may not come out of the
humbler discipline than the higher privilege. The mother's eyes may
swim as she hears her little daughter sing her baby brother to sleep on
the cottage threshold,--her eyes may swim at the thought how those wild
and moving tones might have been exalted by art. Such art would have
been in itself a good; but would this child then have been, as now,
about her Father's business, which, in ministering to one of his little
ones, she is as surely as the archangel who suspends new systems of
worlds in the furthest void? Her occupation is now earnest and holy;
and what need the true mother wish for more?

What is poverty to those who are not thus set in families? What is it
to the solitary, or to the husband and wife who have faith in each
other's strength? If they have the higher faith which usually
originates mutual trust, mere poverty is scarcely worth a passing fear.
If they have plucked out the stings of pride and selfishness, and
purified their vision by faith, what is there to dread? What is their
case? They have life, without certainty how it is to be nourished.
They do without certainty, like "the young ravens which cry," and work
for and enjoy the subsistence of the day, leaving the morrow to take
care of what concerns it. If living in the dreariest abodes of a town,
the light from within shines in the dark place, and, dispelling the
mists of worldly care, guides to the blessing of tending the sick, and
sharing the food of to-day with the orphan, and him who has no help but
in them. If the p