Trusting in God.

"TRUST in Him at all times."-Ps. lxii. 8.

"Trust in the Lord with all thine heart."-PROV. iii. 5.

To trust in ourselves is presumption; to trust in riches, folly; to trust in princes is to provoke disappointment; the only safe trust is in God.

I never trusted God but I found Him faithful; nor my own heart, but I found it false.

We must encourage our confidence in God with this, that He made heaven and earth, and He who did that can do anything. We seldom or never see those forsaken who trust in God. Keep God thy friend in prosperity, and thou mayest with confidence resort to Him and rely upon Him in adversity.

The promise may be long delayed,
But never comes too late.

When we trust in frames and feelings, as soon as they are gone the soul is discouraged and dejected; but when we trust in God's promises, which are always the same, then it is we are right; and a sense of God's unchangeable love towards us, proceeding from such trust, fires our souls with a continual love towards Him.

They trust in navies, and their navies fail-
God's curse can cast away ten thousand sail!
They trust in armies, and their courage dies;
In wisdom, wealth, in fortune, and in lies;
But all they trust in withers, as it must,

When He commands in Whom they place no trust.

God sustains the world, and He governs it.

How calmly may we commit ourselves to the hands of Him who bears up the world-of Him who has created, and who provides for the joys even of insects, as carefully as if He were their father!

Endless all malice, if our God is nigh;
Fruitless all pains, if He His help deny;
Patient I pass these gloomy hours away,
And wait the morning of eternal day.

Lady Jane Grey.

When God's way is in the sea, so that He cannot be traced, yet we are sure that His way is in the sanctuary, so that He may be trusted.

If God be our guide, He will be our guard.

He only may rest in God that hath been restless in the means. He that can fully lay out himself in God's way, may confidently lay up his faith in God's providence. I must sow my seed, and wait upon the clouds and the sun; do my work, and leave the event to God. I must neither be idle in the means, nor make an idol of the means. I must not presume upon the means without God; nor upon God without the means. Not upon the means without God, because the pipe cannot convey except the spring communicates; not upon God without the means, because the goings forth of Providence are always in the paths of diligence. I must therefore lay my hand to the means, as if they were all in all; and yet raise my eye above the means, as if they were nothing at all.

We must beware of presumption in expecting too much, as well as of unbelief in expecting too little.

God loves to be trusted; there are two things of which He is jealous-our love and our trust.

Trust shows the difference between a dead faith and a living faith. There may be faith without trust, though there cannot be trust without faith. The devils believe, but do not trust. Does my faith rise into trust?

It is frequently the glory of poor unlettered Christians to rejoice in the simplicity of trust, as a humble Christian well said, "I can't argue, but I can trust."

One chief end of what often seems so mysterious in the providence of God is, to train God's people to trust their Father more. Why do not Christians trust the Lord more fully? Is it not often because they do not know what He would do with them, and they have lurking suspicions that it might take them too far?

Believers, whilst resting peacefully in trust, should beware of trusting in their trust! It must not be faith they look to, but Christ, the object of their faith.

Truth.

THE best way to find out truth is to be much in the study of the Scriptures.

As God is the author of truth, so He is the teacher of it. Truth is so great a perfection as to have led Pythagoras to say that if God were to render Himself visible to man, He would choose light for His body and truth for His soul.

The grand character of truth is its capability of enduring the test of universal experience, and coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair discussion.

Great is the strength of truth. Truth will prevail.

Truth is but one, error endless, and interminable. Men miss truth more often from their indifference about it than from intellectual incapacity.

Our great duty is to encourage vigorous action of the mind. The greater number of free and vigorous minds brought to bear upon a subject, the more truth is promoted.

It is easy to exclude the noon-tide light by closing the eyes; and it is easy to resist the clearest truth by hardening the heart against it.

Truth is the object of our understanding, as good is of our will; and the understanding can no more be delighted with a lie than the will can choose an apparent evil.

There is much pains in the search of truth, much skill in finding it; the value of it once found requites the cost of both. Truth lies in a deep well.

A valuable truth can never want the meretricious dress of wit to set it off: this dress is a strong presumption of the falsehood of what it covers.

Truth, though sometimes clad

In painful lustre, yet is always welcome;
Dear as the light that shows the lurking rock;
'Tis the fair star, that ne'er into the main

Descending, leads us safe through stormy life.

It is doubtful whether mankind are most indebted to those who, like Bacon and Butler, dig the gold from the mine of literature, or to those who, like Paley, purify it, stamp it, fix its real value, and give it currency and utility. For all the practical purposes of life, truth might as well be in a prison as in the folio of a schoolman, and those who release her from the cobwebbed

shelf, and teach her to live with men, have the merit of liberating, if not of discovering her.

The search after truth should never be discouraged for fear of its consequences. The consequences of truth may be subversive of systems of error and superstition, but they never can be injurious to the rights or the best interests of mankind. Weigh not so much what men say as what they prove. Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since fiction can only please by its resemblance to it.

Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; The eternal years of God are hers; But error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies among his worshippers. Who ever knew truth put to the worse, encounter?

in a free and open

For truth has such a face and such a mien,
As to be lov'd needs only to be seen.

"I do not know," says Newton, "what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smooth pebble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.'

Nearly all errors are the perversion of some truth. Theories are not verities. Half truths are often lies.

Judge not truth by outward appearance. Leave the outward show, and see by the Word of God what truth is. Ask and demand of your book, the Testament of Jesus Christ, what you should think, and what you should stay upon for a certain truth. Whatsoever truth is brought unto us contrary to the Word of God, it is not truth, but falsehood and error; whatsoever honour done unto God disagrees from the honour required by His word, it is not honour unto God, but blasphemy.

Let us go to God for truth; for truth cometh from God only.

But truths, on which depends our main concern,

That 'tis our shame and misery not to learn,

Shine by the side of every path we tread
With such a lustre, he that runs may read.

Truthfulness.

I PROFESS to be a Christian, and therefore a follower of Him Who is the Truth, and of Whom it may be truly said, "The law of truth was in His mouth," and of Whom it is written, "Neither was any deceit in His mouth."

As the same mind must be in me that was in Christ Jesus, so must the same law of truth be in my mouth that was in His. I must therefore at all times and in all things speak the truthheart as well as with my mouth.

with

my

The good I stand on is my truth and honesty.

Above all things always speak the truth; your word must be your bond through life.

Oh, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil. Epaminandos was so careful of truth that he would not tell a lie even in sport.

I had rather seal my lips, than to my peril
Speak that which is not.

Suppressio veri et suggestio falsi—the suppression of truth and the suggestion of falsehood are the strongest charges that can be made against an orator or writer.

Lie not, but let thy heart be true to God,
Thy mouth to it, thy actions to them both.
Cowards tell lies and those that fear the rod.
Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie.
A fault which needs it most grows two thereby.
This above all,-To thine own self be true;
And it must follow as the night the day
Thou can'st not then be false to any man.

Horace wrote:

"Fictions to please should bear the face of truth."
'Tis strange but true; for

Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

Truth is the bond of union and the basis of human happiness. Without this virtue there is no reliance upon language, no confidence in friendship, no security in promises and oaths.