each varying feature of your case; you would even provide yourself with
remedies, which, on the faith of his skill, you would trustingly use to
meet every symptom that might arise on future occasions. But when the
Great Physician manifests a still greater watchfulness to adapt his
daily discipline to your varying temper and the different stages of your
Christian growth, you murmur--you believe not in his wisdom as you do in
that of the sons of earth.

Do not, then, take his wisdom on faith alone; you must indeed believe,
you must believe or perish; but it may be as yet too difficult a lesson
for you to believe against sense, against feeling. What I would urge
upon you is, to strengthen your weak faith by the lessons of experience,
to seek anxiously, and to pray to be enabled to see distinctly, the
peculiar manner in which each trial of your daily lot is adapted to your
own individual case.

I do not speak now of great trials, of such afflictions as crush the
sufferer in the dust. When the hand of God is so plainly seen, it is
comparatively easy to submit, and his Holy Spirit, ever fulfilling the
promise "as thy day is, so shall thy strength be,"[15] sometimes makes
the riven heart strong to bear that which, in prospective, it dares not
even contemplate. You, however, have had no trial of this nature; yours
are the petty irritations, the small vexations which "smart more because
they hold in Holy Writ no place."[16] Even at more peaceful times, when
you can contemplate with resignation the general features of your lot in
life, you cannot subdue your spirit to patience under the hourly varying
annoyances and temptations with which you are beset. The peculiar
sensitiveness of your disposition, your affectionate, generous nature,
your refinement of mind, and quick tact, all expose you to suffer more
severely than others from the selfishness, the coarse-mindedness, the