Your letter of the 18th of August last was conveyed, I presume, through some private hand, and did not reach me till some months after its date. It contained, as you will perhaps recollect, the painful accounts of the bereavements which you have lately been called to endure, in the loss of your two most beloved daughters; and to one of your disposition and habits—one so affectionate, and domestic, and in every sense paternal—the dispensation must have been one of no ordinary suffering; and yet so sweetly do the feelings of the true Christian combine with those of the sorrowing parent, that I almost envy you the power which you so blessedly possess; an attainment to which I look up, when I consider it in reference to yourself, with admiring gratitude; but which, when I advert to, in contrast to my own imperfect and limited experience, humbles me in the dust. Hitherto, indeed, I have had but little affliction in my family; yet that little has not been borne with that meek and patient submission—with that deadness to the world and that detachment from the creature—which ought to characterize the child of God. But if I so readily faint in the day of comparatively minor sorrows, how can I be expected to stand in the day of increased and lengthened suffering—the _evil_ day, asked for by Satanic malignity, and rendered but too necessary in order to bring before me the latent evils of my own unsanctified heart? Still, however, the divine panoply has been mercifully provided; and what should hinder me from becoming strong in the Lord and in the power of his might? I will therefore hope in his mercy. I will expect, that should sufferings await me, such as those with which my endeared friend has been visited, I may still be enabled to glorify my God in the day of my visitations; and then all will be well. For sanctified sorrow not only loses all its pungent and corrosive, and deadly qualities, and thus leaves our neutralized minds in the possession of calm and settled peace; but it has reference also to that happy and eternal state above, where all our light and momentary afflictions shall be succeeded by that inconceivable weight of glory which shall suffer neither diminution nor end.