ALL SAFE, for He will bring them with Him. And as each glows with immortality, and reflects the lustre and beauty of heaven, we shall understand the meaning of many a sorrowful and mysterious dispensation; learning to rejoice where now we weep, or rather, were it possible, weeping aloud for joy. Let Abraham, then, be ready to part with Isaac. Let Rachel no longer weep for her children because they are not. Let every one who has ever seen one of his precious nurslings decline and expire, rather exclaim, in the noble language of the Christian poet :

"With all my soul, O GOD, I give,

The child Thy love hath taken away,
On earth I would not have him live;
With me I would not have him stay;

The sacrifice long since was o'er,
I stand to what I gave before.

All I have left for Jesu's sake,

And shall I grieve to part with one?
No, if a wish could call him back,
I would not have my darling son
Brought from his everlasting rest,
Torn from his Heavenly Father's breast.

Pass a few fleeting days or years,

And I shall see my child again : When Jesus in the clouds appears,

I shall with him in glory reign; I and the children He hath given Inseparably joined in heaven!"

The Rev. Prebendary JACKSON,

Rector of Stoke Newington.

REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF

DAVID'S

CHILD.

OUT of the many trains of reflection which a narrative so striking as that under review may be presumed to furnish, we select only two for consideration.

The first is, the conduct of a pious man under the melancholy pressure of bereavement; and the second, the grounds upon which that conduct is founded. It may be remarked that David visited, first of all, the house of the Lord. He acknowledged by that appropriate act that afflictions do not spring out of the dust; but that every time we are called to witness the stroke of immortality actually inflicted, the Eternal is addressing a direct and sensible appeal to our own souls. If, with the Lord Jehovah are the issues of life and death, if it is He who sustains the tenure of that golden cord, by which spirit and body are united,-and if He be a being of consummate knowledge and love,—then it is

for us that "our brethren sicken," and for us that " our children die.' We are to see and to reverence the hand of the Lord, whenever death enters our habitations; and to learn as we gaze upon the dissolving material after the spirit has fled, the silent eloquence of its summons to our souls. This principle specially applies to the death of children. They do not expire in the ordinary course of nature; there seems to be something premature in their removal; and thus we trace more vividly the interference of Him, at Whose voice our breath goes forth, at Whose recal it returns to Him who gave it. David, as he bent over the withered blossom on which his affections had been centered, and saw it carried to its early grave, felt that his bereavement was a stroke from GOD; that it called for solemn self-examination and circumcision of heart; that He who ordains the course of all events, had ordained this also; and that earnest inward enquiry should be connected with solemn worship. Before him was an affecting spectacle. His child cut off in the first dawn of the morning; before perhaps it had learnt to whisper the endearing name of father, or understood the melting voice of a mother's tenderness. It went to his heart, like the proclamation which Isaiah was com

manded to make to the assembled Jewish people, when the voice said, cry, and the prophet asked, what shall I cry,-" All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the Spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass." The grass withereth, the flower fadeth;-but David knew in connexion with the desolating fact, that the word of our Lord shall stand for ever. He, therefore, joined with the public worshippers at the Lord's house. He felt that there he was in the scenery of revelation; that there, amidst the human race sickening and expiring, were the pure and ineffable communications, which reveal our immortality. The monarch kneeling there amid symbolic sacrifices and inspiring hymns; he felt that the glorious majesty of the great GOD his Saviour would endure for ever: and glad to slip away from the painful toils of power, and the struggles of imperial sovereignty, he bowed in the temple of the Lord, a poor common mortal, one, the extent of whose territory, the power of whose arms, could not add a minute to the life of his expiring child. It is thus that many a Christian, living under the lustre of that dispensation which David died to know, has gone up

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