dear
friends may soon be here from Aleppo; it would indeed be a great
comfort; but the Lord regards, in this dispensation, our real
advantage more than our sensible comfort, we therefore desire to leave
all to his Holy, gracious ordering, who, though he orders all things
after the counsel of his own free will, has no will towards us, but
that we should be filled with the fulness of Christ, and be conformed
to his image.

[31] Constantinople.

_May 19._--The water to-day has again fallen considerably in price,
and as far as we can judge, God has mercifully nearly extinguished
this desolating plague. I now feel quite satisfied the attack I had
the other day was an attack of the plague, though very slight. The
schoolmaster, yesterday, was attacked in the same way with a pain in
his back and head, and a pain in his glands, one of which is decidedly
enlarged, but still it is very slight, and I trust to-morrow, with the
Lord's blessing, to see him, with the exception of weakness, well
again. We are, thank God, all well; the only thing I now suffer from
is weakness and pain in the glands and under the arm, but there is no
enlargement, and I trust in a day or two it will go entirely away. I
heard, to-day, the Pasha had been ill of the plague this week; it is
now reported he is dead; but we know nothing certain. One of his sons
is also dead.

This has been a heavy day with my poor heart, so slow a scholar am I
under my dear Master's teaching. Yet I feel he will fill me with his
own most blessed presence, and then I shall be able to bear easily all
other bereavements. How strange it is that feeling should rule with so
much more power than principle, over the happiness of the soul, even
when the spirit still imparts strength to direct the conduct aright.
The feelings seize on the slightest recollection; and oh, what fuel
have they when every thing in the minutest daily occurrences, every
thing in the events passing around us, at once come directly on the
heart and press upon it; and when there is not a soul near, not only
not to supply all that is lost, but not even a portion of it, and yet
notwithstanding all this, that now weighs on me, I feel the Lord
himself will be yet more to me than all I have lost. I feel I have
been skimming too much on the surface of Christianity instead of being
clothed with Christ. Oh! what a child am I in the life of faith, but I
feel the Lord has my poor soul in his training, and though the
di