these occasions has always been to shake or subvert my faith.

"I call the onset made by surprise, because waking suddenly from sleep has perhaps found me without the calm use of my judgment; and because waking in a state of tremor and alarm, though without any apparent cause, has tended to dissipate, if not to divert, my thoughts. I have been in this state from one to two hours at a time, without being able to derive any consolation from scripture promises; every scripture was turned against me in the most artful way; and although I was conscious, and knew that it was the enemy at work with me, I have been entirely powerless; I could not get rid of the terror. If I turned

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to the Saviour for help, my prayer was interrupted with either incoherent or blasphemous thoughts; if I pleaded promises, that promise does not belong to you,' was put into my heart. On one occasion, I awoke in the greatest tremor; I was shaking from head to feet. I had not been dreaming. My mind was under a kind of incoherent alarm. 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' was my first ejaculation. I sought Christ in prayer, striving through impediments;-I could not find him; I exclaimed with Job, 'Oh that I knew where I might find him, I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments, and he would put strength into me; he would not plead against me with his great power.' My prayer was interrupted by the 37th verse of the 37th Psalm being forced upon my consideration : -Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace;' and the accompanying consideration,—your end is not peace, therefore you are neither the perfect nor the upright the psalmist spake of. Thus did Satan distress me.

"However I might suffer for a time through the enemy's importunity, or the hidings of God's face, (and no doubt the enemy knew the best season for practising his infernal arts,) yet in the end I have always experienced that, when I could exercise the prayer of faith, the spell was broken; and I now know that when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.'

"I have sometimes been kept from sleep in this way till five or six o'clock in the morning; but the Christian soldier must not expect uninterrupted sleep in the enemy's country-especially it would not be seemly to sleep while he is on the alert; nor, indeed, until he has been successfully repelled."

Again-" During a paroxysm of my disease, I awoke several nights in great mental terror. The leading impression upon my mind was-now death is upon me, what shall I suffer? The thought was immediately injected into my mind, take a good dose of opiate, (a medical man would administer it ;) it will still your sufferings, and assist in ending them.' As soon as the diabolical thought was conceived, I saw 'the cloven foot.' I said unto the devil, This is your hour, and the power of darkness.' I turned to Christ; I prayed earnestly to him; he poured in the Balm of Gilead, and I was enabled to reject the opiate the devil would have administered: Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil; for we wrestle not only against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.'

"The way to the heavenly country is through quicksands and dangers, but when the heart is established with grace,' the footing is firm the remainder of the

journey; it is true, we still march through an enemy's country, and must expect to combat; vigilance and watchfulness are as necessary to the veteran as to the recruit.

"A living faith in full exercise I have found to be the only and the speediest remedy against the fierce onsets of Satan; such a faith, after a season of spiritual desertion, or an assault of the enemy, has caused to flow bitter tears of joy!"

Would the reader feel inclined to indulge the thought that the consideration of such a subject as the Christian conflict has a discouraging tendency? Were it so, still it forms part of that knowledge which every Christian ought to possess. We are not equally tried, but we are all tried in one way or other. In a field of battle, some regiments are more hotly engaged than others, and of course the same may be said of every soldier. It was remarked at the field of Waterloo, that the most athletic men and the best swordsmen in the horse-guards, where they had opportunities of encountering the enemy hand to hand, fell earlier in the day, and more in number, than men of less power and skill. The former, from a feeling of confidence in their powers, put themselves forward to engage the enemy; the latter, from diffidence, kept themselves back. Of the former, very many fell; of the latter, very many escaped without a wound. Of the former there were men who killed of the enemy, with their own hands, from three to eleven in number; of the latter, there were men who did not give a single wound. The former obtained high honour, the latter got a Waterloo medal!

May not this be the case in the spiritual conflict, that those who most resolutely oppose the kingdom of the wicked one, and strenuously exert themselves to

"pull down strongholds, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God," are those who are called to endure the greatest conflicts with the powers of darkness? Suppose that it is so, should this be a reason for relaxing exertions to advance the kingdom of Christ, and to overturn the enemy's reign? Should it? surely not. It was for this very object and end that we enlisted into Immanuel's army, and would we for fear of conflict betray his cause who is "King of kings, and Lord of lords"? Do we not know that "greater is he who is for us, than all they that are against us"? Do we not know that "the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations"? What if we should be slain in combat? The soldier enters the field of battle with the probability of that result; and then, as we fight to obtain an incorruptible crown, "a crown of glory that fadeth not away," we gain possession of it the sooner. "Hallelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth !"

THE NEW BIRTH.

And

WE read in the Bible that when Samson, who was the strongest man, was about to be married to a daughter of the Philistines, he propounded a riddle to his companions; that is, a difficult and obscure sentence for them to solve-"Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness." they could not expound the riddle, for it was difficult; but this is not the only riddle that the Bible contains. Here is another: "How can a man be born when he is old ?" It is a difficult and abstruse question for the individual to answer who never heard of regeneration. Reader, it is a question that has puzzled wiser heads than yours and mine. Nicodemus, who put this question to our Lord, was an old man, a ruler of the Jews, and both great and learned, conversant with the law of Moses, and an expounder of that law. He was one of the Sanhedrim, or great council of seventy elders; and yet he put a question which appears to be childish in the extreme: "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be born ?"

The solution of the riddle which Samson put to his companions ended in slaying thirty of the Philistines; but, if in solving the question that is now fairly be