Page:Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse.pdf/176

 where difficulties, vexations, and disappointments spring up in the paths of knowledge, duty, and enjoyment. They are placed there as an exercise of your patience, your fortitude, your perseverance: go forth with this armour, and you shall prevail; shrink, and be a slave forever.

Want of sincerity is observable in many of the Christians of the present day. They exhort, but do not practise; they believe, but do not feel. The consequence is that they neither enjoy what they profess, nor give others reason to suppose that they understand what it implies.

Religion is supposed by the world to be a system of rigour and austerity, marking its miserable votaries with the traces of melancholy, and supplanting all the innocent affections of life. How careful ought its professors to be, that their deportment evince no unsociability, moroseness, or want of courtesy!

"Why should we mourn that we are so weak, and exposed to afflictions; when one liveth to