office and settle for at least one months rent in advance. The month
for which she had paid expired in three days, and she was apprehensive
of being turned out, unless she could collect sufficient money to pay
him. She knew not where to find the means. The room was stripped bare
of furniture to supply the calls of nature; nothing but a mattress in
one corner of the apartment, and a few cooking utensils remained. She
labored day and night, to procure work, but all her efforts were
unavailing. It appeared to her as if the Almighty had forsaken herself
and children, and had left them to perish through want.

It cannot be that God would place his image on earth, and willingly
leave them to perish from destitution. Many have been known to die of
starvation, and the tales of wretchedness and woe with which the
public ear is often filled attest the fact. Squalid forms and
threadbare garments are seen, alas! too often in this civilised world,
and the grave of the pauper is often opened to receive some unhappy
mortal, whose life had been one scene of suffering and want.
Philanthropy shudders and Christianity believes it to be a punishment,
administered by the hand of God; that the haggard cause of the starved
creature, who has thus miserably died, once contained the spirit of a
mortal undergoing the penalty of Him, who judges mankind on high, and
expiating through his heart-rending bodily agony, crimes committed in
by-gone days.

This is not so in all cases. What mercy could we attribute to God, did
he willingly entail misery upon the innocent, or punish them for the
crimes of the guilty? Why call it a dispensation of Divine justice,
that would condemn to weeks, months and years of wretchedness, the
mortals he brought in the world himself? Who hath seen the hovel of
the pauper; beheld its wretched inmates, heard their tale of woe,