And this question, as he reflected on it, gave calmness to his mind, and he soon fell into a quiet and refreshing sleep. And the same thought should, in all circumstances, lead us to trust all the future, in calm confidence, to an infinitely wise and directing providence, knowing that God will do all things well. "The Lord reigneth, let the earth be glad!" 2. If a constant and particular providence is exercised over the world by an all-wise and benevolent God, then we should never be dissatisfied with any of his dealings. We are sometimes tempted to complain of the hardships of our earthly lot, or to murmur at the mysterious dispensations of providence. But if we make a proper practical improvement of the doctrine before us, we shall rejoice that a God of infinite wisdom and goodness is on the throne, and that all things are ordered by him with the wisest counsel, and for the best ultimate ends. Whatever be our condition, we shall recognize in its allotment the kind hand of our heavenly Father; and if others are more favored than ourselves, we shall be satisfied that it is for the wisest and best of reasons. Whatever may be our station in life, we shall feel that it is for us the station of honor and fitness and duty, and that our estimation in God's sight depends not on the elevation of our sphere, but on the manner in which we fill it. The same train of remark is equally applicable to the inequality of the dealings of providence as manifest in the world around us, against which we are sometimes disposed to murmur as unjust or severe. We refer not to the theoretical objections of the infidel, which are easily answered, but rather to that want of entire practical confidence in God, in reference to the dark dispensations of his providence, which sometimes leads even the Christian to be dissatisfied with his allotments, as if they might have been changed for the better. But as to all such dispensations, every rising murmur should at once be hushed with the thought that God is infinitely perfect; and that if many of his providential movements now appear unjust and unwise, it is only because they are not seen in all their relations as they will be in the light of eternity. So far, then, from dishonoring God by assuming to sit in judgment on the operations of his providence, we should ever cherish a child-like faith in the wisdom and rectitude of all his dealings, knowing that they are all conducted not only by infinite wisdom, but by infinite goodness. There is a Jewish tradition concerning Moses, which so beautifully illustrates this point, that it is worthy of being repeated, for though only a fable, it is not, on that account, the less instructive. That great prophet, says one of the Rabbins, was called by God to the top of a high mountain, where here he was permitted to propose any questions he pleased concerning the government of the universe. In the midst of one of his inquiries, he was commanded to look down on the plain below, where was a clear spring of water. At this spring a soldier had alighted from his horse to drink. Having quenched his thirst, no sooner had he gone, than a little boy came to the same place, and finding a purse which the soldier had dropped, took it up and went his way. Soon after there came an infirm old man, with hoary hairs, and weary with age and travelling, who, having quenched his thirst, sat down to rest by the side of the spring. The soldier by this time had missed his purse, and coming back, demands it of the old man, who affirms that he has not seen it, appealing to heaven to attest his innocence and the truth of his declarations. The soldier, not believing him, kills him on the spot! Moses falls on his face, in horror and amazement, that such an event should be permitted by God; when the divine voice thus prevents his expostulation: "Be not surprised, Moses, that the Judge of all the earth should have suffered this to come to pass. To you there seems to be no reason why that child should be the occasion of the old man's blood being spilt. But know that that same old man, years ago, was the murderer of that child's father!" So in every dispensation of providence, there is some wise design; and in every one, the Judge of all the earth will do right! 3. In the doctrine of a particular providence, we should find an unfailing source of consolation in all the afflictions and trials of life. The favorite maxim of the well known Bernard Gilpin was, "All things are for the best." When he was accused of heresy, and set out for London to be tried before the cruel Bishop Bonner, on the journey he fell and broke his leg. "Is all for the best now?" said a scornful companion. "I have no doubt that it is," was the meek and believing reply. And so it proved; for before he was well enough to resume his journey, Queen Mary died, and instead of going to London to be burned, he returned home in safety. To all of us, this world is one of sorrow and trial, in which every one must expect his portion of calamity. Afflictions beset the whole pathway of life, and the agonies of death keep their watch at its close. But though we are born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, we know that all is for the best for those that put their trust in God. Afflictions do not spring forth from the dust, and troubles do not come from the ground; but all things are ordered by ONE who loves us too well not to mingle trials with our joys. Without his permission, no power can harm, and no evil befall us. And every afflictive stroke is meant for our good; to cultivate our graces, to mortify passions, to elevate and purify our affections, and so to discipline our spirits as to work out for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory in heaven. Let the atheist who fancies that chance dashed the fragments of chaos into a world, believe it if he can, that the same chance directs, or rather leaves at random every event. It is the consolation and joy of the believer to know that God is the God of individuals, and of individual events, and that every thing which transpires is ordered by him; that every dispensation, whether joyous or grievous, is sent with some definite purpose of mercy; and that even the evils of life are designed to instruct us in patience and virtue. 4. This doctrine of a particular providence should also teach us always to be watchful of our conduct. The thought that God is ever about us, moving in every motion, and acting in every event, makes this world a serious world, and should lead us to walk through it with serious steps, with our hearts upon duty and our eyes upon heaven. It should indeed increase our cheerfulness and sweeten our enjoyments, to think that in them all our Father is beside us; but it should also fill us with a holy jealousy of ourselves, and with anxious watchfulness against every thing, whether in spirit or conduct, which may be displeasing to him. An ancient philosopher advised the magistrate, as a restraint upon the wicked, to write at the corner of every street, "God sees thee, O sinner!" But to all who believe in a particular providence, the inscription "God sees thee," is not only in every street, but upon every object, above, around, within and beneath them. If we would but open our hearts to its reception, every thing would proclaim to us the obvious presence of that God, Who gives its lustre to the insect's wing, And wheels his throne upon the rolling worlds." We might see it in our own existence and enjoyments; in the revolving year and the changing seasons. We might read it in the stars, the alphabet of heaven, in which God has stereotyped his own glory, and in the planets which are rolled by his own hand through trackless space. We might hear it in the thunder's voice, and see it in the lightning's flash. Every insect would sing to our ears of the hand that sustains it. Every breeze would murmur of his presence. Every leaf would whisper, "God is here!" And if the imaginary presence of some great and good man could restrain impropriety and prompt to nobleness of conduct on the part of a pagan, then surely the known presence of the greatest and best of all beings should make us watchful of all our actions, check the first risings of folly and sin, give purity to our motives, and humility to our hearts, and holiness to our lives, and lead us to live as under the very eye of God, and in such a manner as to secure his approbation, both here and hereafter! THE MISERIES OF OLD-MAIDEN HOOD. THE OTHER SIDE. 66 A SPLENDID theory is that idene it that their synonyms bear the titles of wives and widows- Mrs. Grundy, Madame Rumor?) If Miss Polly had quoted Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, wouldn't her philosophizings have been branded as maudlin sentimentalism, "vain regrets and useless repinings over broken dreams," or the yet more romantic yearn Responsibilities of Old-Maidenhood," for which see OUR MONTHLY for January-as beautiful as a maiden's dream of her first hero, and about as substantial. Methinks I can see the writer now, some demure Mrs. Smith, as she sits in her quiet library, inditing the few hints by which "duty may become hap-ings after the hero of her girlish fancy? piness," while her sister, Miss Polly, who had a better right to speak on the subject, worries over the said Mrs. Smith's half-dozen responsibilities in the nursery, taxing all her tact and ingenuity to prevent their intrusion upon mamma's literary leisure. Wonder if Mrs. Smith thinks Miss Polly never tires of bearing other people's burdens, and minding other people's children; or that she wouldn't sometimes like to indulge a little literary recreation, at least to the extent of scribbling a letter, or reading a chapter in her Bible? A single leaf from an old maid's dairy, such as Miss Polly could furnish, were worth a dozen fine-spun theories. Mrs. Smith hints that life in other persons' houses may happily be different from that in one's own; Miss Polly could define the difference to a nicety-albeit the house is her sister's. Mrs. Smith intimates that some degree of moral courage is required for an old maid to confront her destiny; Miss Polly could name the amount with mathematical precision. Mrs. Smith has gossipped of her neighbors in a most unneighborly way; Miss Polly wouldn't have dared thus to appear behind the scenes. If she had discovered the "skeleton in the closet," wouldn't everybody have denounced her as a prying, pragmatical old maid? (By-the-by, if all the tattling, scandal, and slander originate with old maids, as the world avers, how comes But lest Mrs. Smith should retort, that I am intruding upon the privacy of her family, I draw no longer upon my imagination for Miss Polly's experience, but proceed boldly to depict my own. I say boldly, for it does require some independence for a good-looking woman, yet in the prime of life, to avow herself an old maid; and genuine "moral heroism to unveil the yawning abysses over which her frail bark has been steered, with no Cæsar at the helm; and the awful whirlpools in which she is likely to be engulfed long before she attains the Scriptural limit of longevity. In many cases, a blessed relief! "Twould be " appalling," indeed, did the dreary "vista" extend into the Egyptian darkness of the septuagenary regions! From the time I was twenty-one, when my "girlish ideal of wedded bliss" vanished into thin air, by the marriage of my Adonis to another woman, I looked forward to old-maidenhood as my "manifest destiny." The prospect didn't frighten me much; on the contrary, I rather anticipated it as a halcyon period in which I should discover the fabled Fountain of Youth; in which I should be emancipated from the restraints that fettered girlhood, and enjoy all the independence of wifehood without its bondage. Never was there a greater fallacy! In the first place, the line of demarcation was too indistinct for me ever to find it. I was drawled out in what she conceived to be willing enough to "accept the situation" at twenty-five, but some uncharitable tones persons-envious girls and malicious widows-wished to force it upon me earlier; others, with whom the summum bonum of life is to marry, and who feared I might be a dead weight on their hands "even down to old age,' hoped, even after I was thirty, to scourge me into society by the rather incompatible suggestions that I "was dying of love," "that I hated all men because none would propose, and this, forsooth, because I once happened to say that the "visits" of a certain fop "were not worth dressing for!" This, however, was but the beginning of troubles, as the sequel -if an old maid's history ever has any sequel-will plainly demonstrate. my I've tried Mrs. Smith's experiments, and found them magnificent failuresone and all! (Perhaps I ought to except "mission to children," as I have to live by it.) It is bad enough to fag out one's life in teaching, but to be the household drudge during the vacation to be admitted into the parlor only when the inane twaddle of the visitors becomes more irksome to the mistress than menial offices, and she proposes an exchange from sheer exhaustion-to have to hear the daily recitations of the children-to teach them their Sunday-school lesson, "is a load that would sink a navy." I'd like to know what time I have for the Sunday-school work, when modern Young America is so wise that it demands at least a week's research among Commentaries and Biblical Antiquities, Church Histories and Sacred Geographies-to say nothing of the hours that must be weekly spent in visitation among the scholars in order to keep the class together. And for Mrs. Smith to have the effrontery to lecture us about the claims of the church, and church organizations, when she would be the first to impugn our motives! It was only the other day that I was repeating quite volubly to a married friend, the proceedings of our Woman's Missionary Society, foolishly imagining she was interested in its details, when the listless creature "Of linked sweetness long drawn out," "Such things may do well enough for Mrs. A., who has always been a public woman, or Miss B., whose age screens her from censure, but I'm sure silence would always sit upon my lips in such an assembly. It savors too much of the "strong-minded women." It was useless to explain, that there was no public speaking, only a dignified family conclave of females, such as Mrs. Smith would approve, by her pen, in which we discussed measures for the elevation of our sex in heathen lands-it still "smacked of Lucy Stone and Woman's Rights," -an expression that sat with peculiar grace upon such patrician Southern lips. And so of all the rest! I never taught a class in Sunday-school that Mrs. Grundy didn't say there was an attraction there of the genus homo; never went on "embassies of mercy" among the poor and sick of the church, that she didn't protest that I had an engagement to meet Deacon C., who was a widower. About the most disinterested act of Christian charity I ever did, was to attend upon the afflicted family of a neighbor of ours-a minister of another denomination-and this, the blatant Madame Rumor bruited abroad as an unsuccessful effort to captivate the Rev. Mr. D.,-a brother clergyman,-as if I would be so recreant to my faith as to marry out of my church! But there is a sense in which the "care of all the churches" is the peculiar burden of old-maidenhood. When innovations menace the old landmarks, and the denominational integrity is threatened by a mere question of words, who so lavish of prayers and tears, (they involve no intermission of household duties, you know,) as the old maids of the congregations? Last summer, when our pastor openly embraced a heresy, who lamented his defection in so extravagant terms, or was so nervously apprehensive of the schism his personal popularity rendered imminent, as Miss Nancy Watson and myself? And this year, when a new sect essays to invade our territory, casm, she changed her tactics, and indusand construct for itself a spiritual house triously circulated the rumor that I, at of "lively stones" from our temple, who the mature age of thirty, was the victim of so faithful alarmists, or so vigilant of an unrequited affection—a piece of folly the interests of Zion, or so eloquent de- I never was guilty of-after I was fifteen. fenders of our tenets, as the same much abused, despised old maids? Time would fail me to advert to other instances in which even my blood relatives have joined in the persecution, taunting me with misplaced attachments, &c.; one old lady going so far as to say "she overheard me just the same as pop the parable" to a youth ten years my was forwarding at that very moment! And what do you suppose it was that she overheard? Only an expression of thanks for an act of brotherly kindness, which I ventured to hope I might some day be able to reciprocate. Could Mrs. Grundy, herself, been guilty of a grosser misrepresentation? After all, it is not so much what they say abroad, as what is said at home, that is so trying to an old maid's temper and patience. It is the "overhearing' eaves-dropping, in plain language-of wives and widows in the household, who resolve themselves into a vigilance com "A genial, pleasant old maid!" Did ever any one hear of such an anomaly? Not that they are worse than other people, after all, but who could be amiable and suave, when their best deeds are misconstrued, and their lightest words misin-junior, and whose suit to another girl I terpreted? I've experimented in Mrs. Smith's "confidence game," and with what result? Every one of the confidences was voluntary, yet in every instance I've been accused of sinister motives, or of being a "busy body in other men's matters. Mothers sometimes charge me with aiding and abetting a romantic attachment, but more frequently of endeavoring to supplant their daughters in the affections of their lovers. I had a pupil once, who roomed with me; a lovely girl to whom I was much attached; but every kindness I ever showed her, every effort to "influence her for good," was attributed to a desire to in-mittee to act as spies upon our words gratiate myself with her wealthy old bachelor guardian, who was one of the pillars of our church. A wild young soldier, whom I had known from his childhood, and for whose reformation I exerted all my influence, was, on his ordination to the ministry, kindly assigned to me by Mrs. Grundy for a husband; and when, in the exercise of his own judgment, he selected some one else for his companion in life, would you believe that she was so regardless of his clerical reputation as to swear he had jilted me? There was another, with whom I was still more intimately associated, to whom I was really attached after a sisterly fashion-he was such a noble fellow, and confided the secret of his engagement in such a brotherly way of whom Mrs. Grundy also took oath that he was my fiancée. As the years rolled on without the anticipated denouement, and I, writhing under the daily martyrdom I received at her ladyship's hands, sometimes indulged a little sar and actions, as if we were still in leadingstrings, that is wearing out our lives. And then if we resent such indignity, such imputations upon our discretion, for it is nothing less, we are called "spiteful;" and little girls, in our very presence, are warned against contracting our "old maidish, disagreeable habits." I, for one, have done looking at unmarried men, not to say talking to them. Here I've been for three months domiciled under the same roof with a fine young man, whose piety "might influence me for good," if I dared strike up a friendship with him, and yet fearing to exchange a word with him beyond the courtesies of the day, or the civilities of the table, lest I should subject myself to uncharitable criticism. I never could preserve a dignified silence, as he does, and my self-imposed restraint causes me to appear so awkward and embarrassed, I dare say he considers me a downright simpleton. It is a serious privation to a woman at any time, to suffer a retrench |