January 2

"Yet the Lord will command his loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life." Psalm 42:8

SONGS in the night!—who can create them? Midnight harmony!—who can inspire it? God can, and God does. The "God of all consolation," the "God who comforts those who are cast down;" the "God of hope," who causes the "bright and morning star" to rise upon the dreary landscape; the "God of peace, who Himself gives peace, always and by all means;" even He, our Maker and Redeemer, gives songs in the night. Music, at all times sweet, is the sweetest amid the sublimity of night. When in the solemn stillness that reigns—not a breath rustling the leaves, and Echo herself slumbers—when in the darkness that enshrouds, the thoughts that agitate, the gloomy phantoms that flit before the fancy like shadows dancing upon the wall, there breaks upon the wakeful ear the soft notes of skillfully touched instruments, blending with the melting tones of well—tuned voices, it is as though angels had come down to serenade and soothe the sad and jaded sons of earth.

But there are songs richer, and there is music sweeter still than theirs—the songs which God gives, and the music which Jesus inspires, in the long dark night of the Christian's pilgrimage. A saint of God is, then, a happy man. He is often most so when others deem him most miserable. When they, gazing with pity upon his adversities and his burdens, and silently marking the conflict of thought and feeling passing within—compared with which external trial is but as the bubble floating upon the surface—deem him a fit object of their commiseration and sympathy, even then there is a hidden spring of joy, an under-current of peace, lying in the depths of the soul, which renders him, chastened and afflicted though he is, a happy and an enviable man. "Blessed are those who mourn now, for they shall be comforted."