“Mamma,” said the sick girl, looking up into her mother’s eyes, “I am sustained by one hope, and that is, that I will soon cease to be a burthen upon dear papa—­my heartbroken papa and you.  I am anxious to pass away to that blessed place where all tears shall be wiped from my eyes;” and as she spoke she raised herself a little, and quietly wiped one or two from them; and, she proceeded, “where the weary will be at rest.  Alas! how little did we expect or imagine this great weight of suffering!”

“My darling child,” said her mother, kissing her pale cheek, and pressing her more tenderly to her bosom, “you have ever been more solicitous for the comfort and well-being of others than you have been for your own; yet, well and dearly as we love you, how can we grudge you to God?  It was He who gave you to us—­it is He who is taking you from us; and what can we say, but blessed be His name?”

“My children,” said the old man, “what would life be if there were nothing to awaken us to a sense of our responsibilities to our Creator?  If it presented to us nothing but one unshaken path of pleasure and ease—­one equal round of careless enjoyment and indolent apathy?  Alas! my darlings, do not we, who are aged and have experience, know that it is those who are not taken by calamity and suffering who gradually fall into that hardness of heart, which prevents the spirit from feeling one of the most wholesome of truths—­that indifference is danger, and that a neglect of the things which belong to a better life, and which serve to prepare us for it, is the great omission of those who are not called upon to suffer.  You know, my children, that whom God loveth He chasteneth, and it is true.  To those whom He graciously visits with affliction, it may be said that He communicates, from time to time, a new revelation of Himself; for it is by such severe but wholesome manifestations that He speaks to and arouses the forgetful or the alienated heart.  Our calamity, however, and sufferings, possess more dignity, and are associated with a greater work than that involved in the isolated sorrows of a single family.  God is chastising a cold, corrupt, and negligent church, through the turbulence and outrage of the people.  What has our church in this country been, within the memory of man, but a mere secular establishment, like the law or the army, into which men enter not from a lofty and pure sense of the greatness of their mission, but as a convenient means of securing an easy and indolent profession?  I know not what our church might have been if left to herself; but this I do know, that for many a long year the unblushing iniquity of British policy has served only to corrupt and degrade her, and to make what ought to be the speaking oracle of God’s truth, the consolation of the penitent sinner, the sure guide to the ignorant or the doubtful—­yes, to make that Church, which ought to be a source of purity, of blessing, and of edification, to all—­a system of corrupt