It must, indeed, be always owing to some deficiency in religious principle, that one discontented thought is suffered to dwell in the mind.  If our heart and our treasure were in heaven,[13] should we be easily excited to regret and irritation about the inconveniences of our position on earth?  If we sought “first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,"[14] should we have so much energy remaining to waste on petty worldly annoyances?  If we obeyed the injunction, “have faith in God,” should we daily and hourly, by our sinful murmuring, imply such doubts of the divine attributes of wisdom, love, and power?  This is a want of faith you do not manifest towards men.  You would trust yourself fearlessly to the care of some earthly physician; you would believe that he understood how to adapt his strengthening or lowering remedies to each varying feature of your case; you would even provide yourself with remedies, which, on the faith of his skill, you would trustingly use to meet every symptom that might arise on future occasions.  But when the Great Physician manifests a still greater watchfulness to adapt his daily discipline to your varying temper and the different stages of your Christian growth, you murmur—­you believe not in his wisdom as you do in that of the sons of earth.

Do not, then, take his wisdom on faith alone; you must indeed believe, you must believe or perish; but it may be as yet too difficult a lesson for you to believe against sense, against feeling.  What I would urge upon you is, to strengthen your weak faith by the lessons of experience, to seek anxiously, and to pray to be enabled to see distinctly, the peculiar manner in which each trial of your daily lot is adapted to your own individual case.

I do not speak now of great trials, of such afflictions as crush the sufferer in the dust.  When the hand of God is so plainly seen, it is comparatively easy to submit, and his Holy Spirit, ever fulfilling the promise “as thy day is, so shall thy strength be,"[15] sometimes makes the riven heart strong to bear that which, in prospective, it dares not even contemplate.  You, however, have had no trial of this nature; yours are the petty irritations, the small vexations which “smart more because they hold in Holy Writ no place."[16] Even at more peaceful times, when you can contemplate with resignation the general features of your lot in life, you cannot subdue your spirit to patience under the hourly varying annoyances and temptations with which you are beset.  The peculiar sensitiveness of your disposition, your affectionate, generous nature, your refinement of mind, and quick tact, all expose you to suffer more severely than others from the selfishness, the coarse-mindedness, the bluntness of perception of those around you.  You often say, in the bitterness of your heart, Any other trial but this I could have borne; every other chastisement would have been light in comparison.  But why have you so little faith?  Why do you