PUBLIC LIBRARY ASTOR, LENOX AND ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by E. H. BUTLER & CO., In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. IN adding another to the many works designed to furnish consolation to the afflicted, the Editor feels that he is but meeting the ever-pressing wants of the human race, and the ever-earnest demands for comfort by those who are visited by bereavement and sorrow. The present work, without interfering with or displacing any of the valuable treatises which have lately been published, has yet a distinct character of its own, in the originality of its design, in the arrangement of its several parts, and in gathering together, from choice and diverse writers, English and American, the strongest and most scriptural consolation which can be offered to the sorrowful and stricken-hearted. Believing, as the Editor does, that all our springs of comfort are in Jesus Christ, that they are applied to the soul by the Holy Ghost, that they are to be sought for by the prayer of faith, and that they result from the overflowing grace of our Heavenly Father, he has aimed to keep these points prominently before the reader, being unwilling to lead him to any of the "broken cisterns" of earth for consolation, when the well-spring of Divine comfort, which can alone staunch his bleeding heart, is pouring forth its free and life-giving waters. It is the lot of all to be visited with sorrow. There is "a time to mourn" marked out in every man's life; and when that time comes, and the fainting spirit turns away from the "miserable comforters" of earth, may all who consult these pages find in God a refuge from every storm, and "a very present help" in every time of trouble: and may they be enabled so to look at their sorrows, with the clear-sighted eye of faith, that they shall discern "a bow" in every cloud of affliction, and "covenant mercy" in every shower of grief. |