Page:Spiritual Reflections for Every Day in the Year - Vol 3.pdf/334

 His Word, and submissive to His Divine government and direction. The whole of His dispensations, whether we pass through adversity or prosperity, joy or sorrow, health or sickness, is with the grand and merciful design "to do us good at our latter end," by receiving us into His kingdom, and making us partakers in the beatitudes of heaven.

E may feel certain that there is not a state or trial through which we pass, that our heavenly Father has not an important reason for; and the design is, the security of our everlasting happiness.

Pride is a vice which seems to man as natural as to speak. Every one of us has a great deal too much of it. We are too prone to think highly of ourselves and of our understandings, of our judgments, and of our abilitics, of our morality, and even of our virtues. And by so much as we think highly of ourselves we often think meanly of and despise others.

Pride delights to contemplate man as the lord of the earth, vested with dominion over all the animated tribes, and gifted with "form and faculties express and admirable." Yea, we have so much pride as to think our own wisdom and virtue will conduct us to heaven, without being beholden to the Lord for assistance. We are in many—perhaps in most—instances, too blind to see whither this pride would conduct us. But all is present to the eye of the Lord, and therefore He