hesitate, when the foresight of their ultimate welfare justifies it, to
draw still more largely on their faith, in acts of apparent harshness
and severity. Time, he knows, will show, though perhaps not till his
yearning heart has ceased to beat for their welfare, that all that all
he did, he did in love. He knows, too, that if his lessons are taken
aright, and his children become the good and happy men he wishes them to
be, they will say, as they visit his sepulchre, and recall with sorrow
the once unappreciated love which animated him,--and perhaps with a
sorrow, deeper still, remember the transient resentments caused by a
solitary severity: 'He was indeed a friend; he corrected us not for his
pleasure, but for our profit; and what we once thought was caprice or
passion, we now know was love.'

These analogies afford a true, though most imperfect, representation of
the moral discipline to which Supreme Wisdom is subjecting us; and as we
are accustomed to despair of any child with whom parental experience and
authority go for nothing, unless he can fully understand the intrinsic
reasons for every special act of duty which that experience and
authority dictate; as we are sure that he who has not learned to obey
when young will never, when of age, know how to govern either himself
or others: so a singular conduct in all the children of dust towards the
Father of Spirits justifies a still more gloomy augury; inasmuch as the
difference between the knowledge of man and the ignorance of a child,
absolutely vanishes, in comparison with that interval which must ever
subsist between the knowledge of the Eternal and the ignorance of man.

The remarks that have been made are not uncalled for in the present day.
For unfortunately, it is now easy to detect in many classes of minds
a tendency to divorce Reason from Faith, or Faith from reason; and to
proclaim that 'what God hath joined together' shall henceforth exist in