Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles; And every sense and every heart is joy.

Then comes Thy glory in the Summer months,
With light and heat refulgent. Then Thy Sun
Shoots full perfection through the swelling year:
And oft Thy voice in dreadful thunder speaks :
And oft at dawn, deep noon, or falling eve,

By brooks and groves, in hollow whispering gales.
Thy bounty shines in Autumn unconfined,
And spreads a common feast for all that lives.
In Winter awful thou! with clouds and storms
Around Thee thrown, tempest o'er tempest roll'd,
Majestic darkness! on the whirlwind's wing,
Riding sublime, Thou bidst the world adore,
And humblest Nature with Thy northern blast.

LESSON IX.

GOD EVER-WORKING THROUGHOUT THE SPIRITUAL WORLD.

"Hand and Heart," in the "Endeavours after the Christian Life," the Rev. J. Martineau. Also, the Second Discourse in the same volume. Also, especially, the Ninth and Newman's “Soul," Part III.-("Sense of Personal Relation to God.”)—“ The Temple of Education," Part I., chap. v., lesson 2.-Greenwood's Sermons of Consolation, 4th sermon : ("God the Guardian of Souls.") - Mrs. Stowe's "Sunny Memories," Letter XXIV. (Clarkson.)

'MOTHER," said Walter, one morning as they sat at breakfast, "I was thinking this morning, as I lay in bed, that it must have been God who wakened me when it began to be daylight. You were fast asleep, and everything was quite still; and I know I did not wake myself; and when I saw the sunshine beginning to brighten upon the opposite hill, and the sky growing so beautiful, and heard the birds beginning to sing, I felt just as if God had wakened me. Do you think it was God who woke me, mother?"

Mother: Without Him, my child, we could neither sleep nor wake. Your soul was in His keeping while you slept. You do not know even where it was—nor what it was doing: you know that it was not using

your eyes, nor your ears, nor any of your bodily powers—that it was no longer in your own keeping; but you know nothing more about it. It may have been thinking, and loving, and willing, all the time you were asleep-you know not. As you awoke,

God enabled you again to do as you chose; it seemed as if He gave you possession of yourself again. You could use your bodily powers again; you could think of what you liked to think of; you could do kind and pleasant things, or you could do selfish and disagreeable things. But your power over yourself did not go very far; it was only in part that you had possession of yourself-only in some things that you could do just as you chose. If you had wished to go to sleep again, for instance,—if you had willed to do so with all the strength of your will, your soul would probably not have obeyed your will;-and often, when God sends sleep to your weary eye-lids, you find you have no power to keep yourself awake. His will is above our will, in our souls, as well as in our bodies.

I will tell you what Peter said to me one day, not long ago. You know he used to work in a coal-pit before he came here: he was not married to Mary then ;-and at one time he used to go down into the pit on a Monday morning, and there he staid till Saturday evening, working hard all the days, and never seeing the sun rise nor set, nor any daylight, to tell him when it was morning or evening-day or night.

Walter: Oh, mother! how miserable that must have been! Why did he do it?

Mother: That is just what I asked him, Walter; and he said, "You may be sure I did not do it because I liked it." It would have been bad enough, he said, if he had come up every evening as the other day-workers did, or every morning as the night-workers did;-they don't go and work for hours in the damp, dark, dirty pit, because they like it, any more than Peter did. Peter said to me that God made them do it; He caused them to do it, by giving them desires of different kinds which could not be gratified unless they did it. I will tell you Peter's story, and then you will see what he meant. when he said God made him stay down in the coalpit, day and night, for a week at a time. God filled his heart, he said, with a great love for Mary; and Mary loved him, and would have married him, but she was very young, and she had been brought up very tenderly, so her father and mother said, "No, Mary must not marry any one who has not a comfortably-furnished home to take her to." They were hard times, and Peter feared he never could earn money enough to furnish a house for her: his companions laughed at him for thinking of it; so he determined he would give it up and not think of Mary any more. But he found he could not do as he determined: he could not help thinking of her;— do what he would, he found his heart was still full of

love for Mary. Then he said to himself, "It is not my own doing that I love Mary. I never tried to love her, nor made up my mind that I would love her; I feel as if it is God's doing that I love her so dearly; surely, then, I need not mind what her parents wish about it. No, I will go on, and not care for them.” So he set off to go and talk it over with Mary;" but," said he, "I did not feel easy in my mind about it; the thought would keep coming to me as I walked along, 'how wrong and unjust this is towards Mary's parents, who have cherished her so tenderly all her life! How mean and cruel to Mary herself, to wish to expose her to poverty and want for my sake!' and I felt certain that, if God sent the selfish love into my heart, he sent these nobler feelings also ;—so I sat down awhile by the road-side to think. And it came strong and plain to my heart that, if I would be worthy of Mary's love, I must do what these nobler feelings told me to do. I must not set at defiance her kind, good parents (for I felt they were in the right even while I was angry with them); but I must do justly by them, and I must love mercy,' and not bring anyone, much less a tender creature like Mary, to want and misery; and I must 'walk humbly before God,' not fancying I can do or be what he intends me to do and be by just following every impulse that comes, but looking always to Him to direct me, and to help me to judge—and then I got upon my feet again, and held up my head, and felt