THE PAST AND THE COMING YEAR.
WHEN the devout and enlightened Christian looks back
upon a departed year, the view it gives him is not one
calculated to raise his opinion of his own merits, or to
teach him to seek comfort from himself. He beholds a
thousand signs of depravity, weakness, and folly, in all
that he has thought and done during that time; talents
but half improved, at the best; time ineffectually spent,
and without that rich abundance of fruit which such a
gift ought to have produced. Where is all the good that
might have been done? and what an amount of evil or
vanity has been allowed to usurp its place! Altogether,
upon looking back, with a fair and candid eye, he is only
driven to cry out with more and more importunity, "God
be merciful to me a sinner." But, on the other hand, he
also sees his whole path to have been strewed with mer-
cies from above. These, indeed, make him feel his sins
the more bitterly; but they also lift up his discouraged
heart, and enable him to find that comfort in a Saviour's