THE GOSPEL MAGAZINE. 1845. CABO "COMFORT YE, COMFORT YE, MY PEOPLE, SAITH YOUR GOD." "ENDEAVOURING TO KEEP THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT IN THE BOND OF PEACE." JESUS CHRIST, THE SAME YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER. WHOM TO KNOW IS LIFE ETERNAL." LONDON: PUBLISHED BY D. A. DOUDNEY, LONG LANE; AND SOLD BY ALL BOOKSELLERS. PREFACE; AND REFLECTIONS ON THE RECEDING YEAR, 1845. WHAT! another year's engagements over? Yes, one more year! And what a mercy, not one among the manifold exercises of the year to be gone through again. They are passed-for ever passed away; they are gone into a land of forgetfulness as if they had never been. Readers, we often esteem it as among the church's peculiar mercies, that however overwhelming in their threatenings, and painful and lingering in their duration, the various soul-travails of its members may be, yet, as it is said of a woman whilst travailing in birth, "she straightway forgetteth her pains, when she heareth that a manchild is born;" so the Lord has wisely and graciously ordered that his children should forget the keenest of their sorrows as soon as the immediate source of those sorrows shall have been removed. The trial may have been severe the apprehensions indescribably afflictive -and the accompanying reflection that, even if delivered, the probable recurrence of the trial would ever tend to agitate and depress the spirit; yet mercifully is it arranged that with the deliverance from the trouble itself, should come a forgetfulness of its keenness, and a revival of hope and of simple dependance upon the Lord for all needed good, and for every promised mercy. The Church of God enters upon the closing month of 1845, not, it is true, in the very midst of those outwardly afflictive circumstances |