often you can, in consequence, take nothing at all, but "suffer hunger.' He knows the pain

of hunger full well; He bore it for you that He might understand it all, and be able to bear you up under the trial. If your "strength is hunger-bitten," He knows it, and pities you. But this may not be your chief trial; it may not have come to this, and yet you may be living in constant anxiety and distress, feeling deeply what very heavy burdens and expenses sickness entails, and that you have no means of meeting these extra expenses. Perhaps you are wholly laid aside from that calling by which you obtained your daily bread. If you have any relations depending on you, you will feel this far more deeply; or, if for the time, you are obliged to be dependent on them, and know with what difficulty they can meet the necessity, you deny yourself in every possible way: nevertheless the costs exceed your means. You are very sick at heart; the constant anxiety preys on your health, and nerves, and spirits; and leaves you less and less probability of returning to your work. In vain you think that if you could only see such a physician you should recover. You feel that you have no means. Perhaps this difficulty is removed; his kindness makes it easy to you, but you have gained little; he orders remedies, those reme

a Job xviii. 12.

lies seem to you either out of your reach, or involving great sacrifices; he tells you that you chiefly need rest and freedom from anxiety. Alas! he might as well have ordered you to China. You think that if you could only go to the sea-side you should recover; it is out of your power. You need a nurse, but cannot have one. You are told to take exercise; you

cannot walk, and yet you cannot afford to have any conveyance. You are to take a great deal of nourishment, which to you is all but impossible, and you feel that you ought to deny yourself every little comfort. Thus you become more and more out of heart and hopeless.

All this, and the innumerable trials which belong to this state, which are best known to those sufferers into whose soul the iron enters, are indeed most bitter griefs. Painful as it may be to you, perhaps it will be your duty to make those friends acquainted with your trial who can assist you. Do not let any pride keep you from it. If our Lord has called you to walk with Him in poverty, remember that He has sanctified the state; it is henceforward a "holy state." Do not let the fear of troubling them hinder you from speaking to them, since He has said, that He will look on all acts of mercy as done to Himself: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye

have done it unto me." Do not defraud your friends of the blessing which is promised to those who give even "a cup of cold water to a disciple in the name of a disciple." You will seek also to take it humbly and thankfully if you are refused; receiving this trial also as from the hands of God. After all, your true and sure comfort will be, that God has called you into this state; that He who has passed through it all, our sympathizing High Priest, knows every step of the way; all its thorns, and snares, and pitfalls; all its crosses, and extreme bitterness. He would not have called you into this suffering, if He had not seen it to be quite necessary for you. Do not reason about it. Do not say sickness would be so easy to bear without poverty. Say only, "It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth good in His sight." I came into these circumstances by no choice of my own, it was His will; and it is His will that keeps me in them. Be sure that He who fed Elijah by ravens, will not suffer you to be "tempted above that ye are able;" for He "the Almighty God is the Lord of life, and of death, and of all things to them pertaining." He can raise up friends for you, and He will do so, when and as He sees best for you; "silver and the gold are the Lord's."

for the

Only lay

• Matt. xxv. 40. b Matt. x. 42. 1 Sam. iii. 18. 1 Cor. x. 13.

e Service for the Visitation of the Sick.

f Hag. ii. 18.

before Him all your wants and circumstances, every little trial, even those which are too small to tell to your friends, and then answer every sad thought, every suggestion of discouragement, or anxiety, or fear for the future, with, "I have nothing to do with the future, that is not in my hands; I have only to do with the present moment: God has placed me in these very circumstances; I must not scan them; I know that they are the best, the very best for me, because the God of Love has placed me in them. It is the will of God."

XV.

DIFFICULTY OF PRAYER.

PRAYER is often a subject of great trial to sick people. They think it should be one of blessing only; but the body and mind are so closely connected, that the weakened and suffering body prevents the free exercise of the mind; "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak."a

You try to fix your thoughts in prayer; you feel that you have so much to ask; so much to pray for. But then a stupor comes over you;

a Matt. xxvi. 41.

you

you try to rouse yourself, but in vain. You start up: "where are my thoughts? What! have I fallen asleep even in prayer, even in speaking to God?" Thoughts seem fixed: it is not so much, sometimes, that your thoughts wander, as that they seem gone, as if they did not belong to you, and you have no control over them. Sometimes even floating images, or figures may flit around you. If you wish to pray for your friends, it seems as if all that could do was just to mention their names before God, and not as you desire, to "ask those things which are requisite and necessary as well for their bodies as their souls." You rarely, if ever, "pour out your heart before Him."a Sometimes you feel that if you could only do so, that if you could only ask for the strength which you feel so greatly to need, then you know that "He would rend the Heavens and come down," and "do exceeding abundantly above all that you can ask or think." seems as if the very endeavour to pray dispersed all your thoughts. You have no realization of His presence; and, what you think worse, no lively, earnest desire to realize it. Does every thing seem to you unreality and abstraction? Does the eye of your soul seem to be dimmed? Do you almost envy him who could say, "I see as trees walking?" You seem to see

men

& Ps. lxii. 8. b Isa. Ixiv. 1. Eph. iii. 20.

It

d Mark viii. 24.