* * * * *

Christian friend, you who are walking through desert places, and perhaps fainting under the heavy hand of God, let not your heart fail you.  Shrink not back from the path, though it seem beset with thorns.  Some good is in store for you.  Affliction, indeed, is not for the present joyous but grievous, nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness.  If, like the mother of Ichabod, you learn to forsake the turbid waters of earth for the Fountain of eternal love—­if you make the Lord your portion, you will not in the end be the loser, though wave on wave roll over you and strip you of every other joy.  No, not even if at length your sun shall set in clouds impenetrable to mortal vision.  A glorious cloudless morning lies beyond, and you shall be forever satisfied with Him who has chosen you in the furnace of affliction.

      “Then rouse thee from desponding sleep,
      Nor by the wayside lingering weep,
  Nor fear to seek Him farther in the wild,
      Whose love can turn earth’s worst and least
      Into a conqueror’s royal feast;
  Thou will not be untrue, thou shall not be beguiled.”

* * * * *

Original.

FEMALE EDUCATION—­PHYSICAL TRAINING.

BY REV.  S. W. FISHER.

I have presupposed three things in reference to education.  The field which it covers is also three-fold—­the body, the intellect, and the heart.

The body is the living temple of the soul.  It is more than a casket for the preservation of the jewel; it is more than the setting of the diamond; it is more even than an exquisitely-constructed dwelling wherein the soul lives, and works and worships.  It is a living, sensitive agent, into which the spirit pours its own life, through which it communes with all external nature, and receives the effluxes of God streaming from a material creation.  It is the admirable organ through which the man sends forth his influence either to bless and vivify, or to curse and wither.  By it, the immortal mind converts deserts into gardens, creates the forms of art, sways senates, and sheds its plastic presence over social life.  The senses are the finely-wrought gates through which knowledge enters the sublime dome of thought; while the eye, the tongue, the hand, are the instruments of the Spirit’s power over the outer world.  The soul incarnate in such a body, enjoys a living medium of reciprocal communication between itself and all things without.  Meanwhile the body itself does not arrive here mature in its powers; nor does it spring suddenly from the imbecility of the infant to the strength of the man.  By slow development, by a gradual growth, in analogy with that of a tree whose life is protracted, it rises, after years of existence, to its appointed stature.  Advancing thus slowly, it affords ample time for its full and free development.