He is here! I feel the everlasting arms underneath and round about me. Heart and flesh are failing. The mists of death are dimming my eyes to the things below, but they are opening on the magnificent vistas of eternity. YONDER He is! seated amid armies of angels. "_My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!_" "THIS GOD SHALL BE MY GOD FOR EVER AND EVER!"
"Dear is the Sabbath morn to me, When village bells awake the day, And with their holy minstrelsy Call me from earthly cares away.
"And dear to me the winged hour, Spent in thy hallow'd courts, O Lord, To feel devotion's soothing power, And catch the manna of Thy Word.
"And dear to me the loud 'Amen,' That echoes through the blest abode-- That swells, and sinks, and swells again, Dies on the ear--but lives to God.
"Oft when the world, with iron hand, Has bound me in its six days' chain, This bursts them, like a strong man's band, And bade my spirit live again."
"And the king said unto Zadok, Carry back the ark of God into the city: if I shall find favour in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me again, and shew me both it, and his habitation."--_2 Sam._ xv. 25.
"When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holy-day."--_Verse 4._
We always commiserate those who have seen better days. Poverty, indeed, under any form, appeals with irresistible power to the sympathies of our better nature. The most heartless and indifferent cannot refuse the tribute of pity to the ragged beggar shivering on the street, or seated in his hovel by the ashes of a spent fire, brooding over a wretched past, with the grim spectral forms of want hovering over a miserable future.
Sad, however, as the condition of such may be, habit, in one sense, may have become to that squalid pauper a second nature. He may never have known a more prosperous state. He may have been inured from his earliest years to buffet life's wintry storm. Chill penury may have rocked his cradle, and ever since sung her rude lullaby over his pallet of straw. Far more is to be pitied the case of those who have sunk from comfort into indigence, around whose early home no bleak winds of adversity ever blew, who were once pillowed in the lap of plenty if not of luxury, but who, by some sudden wave of calamity, have become wrecks on life's desert shore. If there be one being on God's earth more to be pitied than another, it is the mother of a once joyous home, turned adrift, in the hour of her widowhood, with her ragged children;--forced to sing, from door to door, to escape the jaws of hungry famine,--ill disguising, under her heap of squalid rags or her trembling notes of sorrow and despair, the story of brighter days.