to see us suffer as the fruit of our sins, and of our resistance to his
designs. One who has endured much mental suffering cannot have failed to
see, that God's parental relation to us is not analogous to that of
parent and child among men. It terminates in the relations of governor
and of judge; being, indeed, from the first, included in those
relations. This is not so in our earthly relationship. God sees men
suffer as no earthly parent could; he inflicts pain as no earthly parent
should. All is for our profit; but if that object fails through our
perverseness, we are instructed, by our experience, that if God can look
on mental anguish and not relieve it, because he seeks an ulterior good,
the punishment of sin, the natural and just consequences of disobedience
to the great laws of the universe, may be, in their extended impression,
another ulterior good, which will warrant the same mental sufferings
after death, and forever.

Could I be permitted, therefore, I would take by the hand every bereaved
father whom so great an affliction as the death of a child has not
succeeded in bringing into a state of preparation for heaven, and kindly
ask how he expects to bear a final and endless separation. "If thou hast
run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou
contend with horses? and if in the land of peace, wherein thou
trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of
Jordan?" God describes to his ancient people one of the great sorrows
which will happen to them, if they forsake him, in their separations, by
captivity, from their children: "Thy sons and thy daughters shall be
given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with
longing, for them all the day long; and there shall be no might in thy
hand." Pains of absence, sudden convulsions of feeling at the remembered
looks, form, words, and motions of a loved one, sometimes are as when
men feel the earth quaking under them; and then, again, they entirely