under-current of little cares and vexations, which
is slowly wearing on the finer springs of life, is seen by no one;
scarce ever do they speak of these things to their nearest friends. Yet
were there a friend of a spirit so discerning as to feel and sympathize
in all these things, how much of this repressed electric restlessness
would pass off through such a sympathizing mind.

Yet among human friends this is all but impossible, for minds are so
diverse that what is a trial and a care to one is a matter of sport and
amusement to another; and all the inner world breathed into a human ear
only excites a surprised or contemptuous pity. Whom, then, shall the
soul turn to? Who will feel _that_ to be affliction which each spirit
feels to be so? If the soul shut itself within itself, it becomes
morbid; the fine chords of the mind and nerves by constant wear become
jarring and discordant; hence fretfulness, discontent, and habitual
irritability steal over the sincere Christian.

But to the Christian that really believes in the agency of God in the
smallest events of life, that confides in his love, and makes his
sympathy his refuge, the thousand minute cares and perplexities of life
become each one a fine affiliating bond between the soul and its God.
God is known, not by abstract definition, and by high-raised conceptions
of the soul's aspiring hours, but known as a man knoweth his friend; he
is known by the hourly wants he supplies; known by every care with which
he momentarily sympathizes, every apprehension which he relieves, every
temptation which he enables us to surmount. We learn to know God as the
infant child learns to know its mother and its father, by all the
helplessness and all the dependence which are incident to this
commencement of our moral existence; and as we go on thus year by year,
and find in every changing situation, in every reverse, in every
trouble, from the lightest sorrow to those which wring our soul from its
depths, that he is equally present, and that his gracious aid is equally
adequate, our faith seems gradually almost to change to sight; and God's
existence, his love and care, seem to us more real than any other source
of reliance, and multiplied cares and trials are only new avenues of
acquaintance between us and heaven.

Suppose, in some bright vision unfolding to our view, in tranquil
evening or solemn midnight, the glorified form of some departed friend
should appear to us with the ann