nor sleeps? His tender watchful care is at all times upon his little flock; when they saw him they cried in haste," master, master, we perish." And undeserving of his care, they nevertheless experience that he is indeed "slow to anger," as well as "of great power." "He arose and rebuked the wind, and the raging of the water, and they ceased and there was a great calm.”

How great is his tenderness!—when we deserve only reproof, in moments of uncontrolled dismay, he mercifully withholds it; he first quells the storm, and saves us from the dread of being swallowed up, and then utters his mild rebuke, "where is your faith?" He reproves, but does not forsake.

And now in this safe and peaceful harbour, relieved after peril and alarm, we may form some faint conception of the perfect satisfaction which awaits us in that blissful haven of repose upon which our hearts are fixed. We will for ever, then, sing of his mercy and love. From the example of Jesus may we learn to exercise tenderness-may we smooth by our sympathy those rough surges of anguish which ofttimes

pass over the heads of our fellow-voyagers; and may we all be enabled, even while among the billows, to send forth songs of praise and thankfulness, from a deep sense of the care of the great Captain of our Salvation.

XIV.

LUKE VIII. 40.

THE Lord Jesus, during his last sojourn among the Gadarenes, has shaken Satan's kingdom to its foundation. But so attractive, it would seem, is the service of the great apostate, so blind were these men to their own interests, so little were they inclined to obey him who had rescued one of their countrymen from ruin, that the whole multitudes round about, for that very act, besought Jesus to depart, "and he went up into the ship and returned again."

On the strand, and under the shadow of a lofty mountain, whose verdant base meets the waters of Gennesaret, is collected a concourse of people awaiting the appearance of a vessel in the offing. Slender must be their expectation of his return, who had left them to engage in an

extensive work, yet are they on their watchtower, and now they discern a distant mast, which approaches the shore. The ship contains their Lord, and they gladly received him, for they were all waiting for him.'

"The preparation of the heart is from the Lord." He effects it by his varied dealings with the sons of men; we have witnessed a waiting people left by him for a season, that he might visit those who have rejected him; thus be disciplines his church, that he may bring them to a full sense of their helplessness, and rouse in them the spirit of watching,-which is often, as now, abundantly rewarded.

Among the crowd there is one distinguished by marks of superior rank, bowed down with the weight of sorrow, who hastily presses forward, and falls down at the feet of Jesus, and beseeches him that he would come into his house, for he has only one daughter," and she lay a dying."

While the master of the synagogue thus threw himself on the mercy of Jesus, a woman in the crowd " having an issue of blood, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither

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could be healed of any," hoped to obtain an almost furtive blessing from Jesus, and "touched the hem of his garment, and immediately her issue of blood was stanched; "hereupon our Lord, aware of what had taken place, said, Who touched me? for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me. And when the woman saw that she was not hid, she came trembling, and falling down before him, she declared unto him before all the people, for what cause she had touched him, and how she was healed immediately." Our Lord, the friend of the afflicted, who ever sympathizes with our fallen nature, exhibits the infirmities of this abashed and timid female, not in a way to wound the most sensitive delicacy, but as giving birth to a noble act of faith, and let us observe in this case an illustration of the wondrous economy of divine love. Jesus shows the assembled multitude how the heavenly state may be opened to the sinner, by a lively belief in his divine favour, this being the foundation of the gospel which he came into the world to declare. Again, he is about to perform upon the daughter of Jairus one of those miracles, to