Portland Gazette, And Maine Advertiser

The Monitor....No. LXXXVII.

"My ear is pain'd,
"My soul is sick, with every day's report
"Of wrong and outrage, with which earth
is fill'd

So said Cowper, and such sentiments are
most cordially responded by every heart
softened by grace, or alive to the tender
sympathies of human nature. In this day
of trouble and terror, every bosom not wholly
callous will bleed for the woes which
fill the earth, and for the desolations which
spread through the world.

There are many considerations which
more particularly affect the hearts of Christians
at this time. A fear of losing the
privileges they enjoy is a consideration always prompted by self love on the appearance of danger, but a dread of losing the
means of grace from the land, and being
given up as a people to the delusions of their
own chosen way, is a thought which must
sicken the soul, and add new bitterness to
the pangs of the penitent. "Rivers of waters run down mine eyes," said the pious
psalmist, "because they kept not thy law."

The accumulated sins of a sinful people in
a state of warfare must greatly increase the
burden of a heart weighed down with a
sense of its own guilt, and a sense of this
will cause a sorrow for the sins of others,
known only to the heart renewed by grace.

It is difficult to conceive how strife and
bloodshed can find advocates among the
professed friends of the religion of peace,
or how love which worketh no ill to its
neighbour can exist in a heart struggling
for the mastery and filled with enmity and
war. 'Tis indeed true that each "Patriot
breast bleeds in its country's woundings,"
but while he whose wisdom is infinite still
casts the destinies of men, while he whose
sole province it is to bring good out of evil,
light out of darkness, and order out of confusion still sits at the helm of universal government, we need not fear that the sceptre
of the wicked will always rest on the lot of
the righteous, but may rest assured that God
in his own way, in his own time, and by
means of his own appointment will bring
about his own ends, namely, the glory of
himself, the prosperity of his church, and
the eternal happiness of his chosen.