To Mr. _T. L._
_My dear L._
TAMPER with no physicians, but content yourself, to have that share of health, which a regular and good life can help you to.――Reflect not upon your predominant complexion, or how long it will be before you get from under its power. St. _Paul_ wanted to be delivered from his thorn in the flesh. He had all he prayed for, though the thorn might continue, when God said to him, _My grace is sufficient for thee_; this was better to him, than if his thorn had been taken from him. This enabled him to say, I will _glory in my infirmities_; for _when I am weak, then I am strong_. *You believe, that if it was not for earnest and continual prayer, your turn to melancholy would get the better of you. You cannot believe this too much, for nothing else can preserve you from being led away by every other evil temper. But let resignation to God be the predominant part of your spirit of prayer; it is not so much ardent desires, as humble resignation to be as God pleases, that keeps the heart in the highest union with him. Faith and hope and love get their best strength, when resignation is the salt wherewith they are seasoned.
You think, if you was to live an hundred years in an _abstracted contemplation_, some property of nature, would still be occasionally breaking forth in you. What occasion had you, my friend, to make this complaint about such a contemplation?
*You have no business with it, nor any reason to expect it should do any thing for you. Had you changed your words, and said, I believe if I was for a hundred years to be wholly trusting in, and depending upon God, to do that for me which he has promised to do for all that trust in him, it would not be done: had you expressed your complaint in these words, you would have seen, that neither faith, nor hope, nor love, nor resignation would have allowed you to make it. Look at yourself, at the power of time, or any thing that this or that complexion does, and then you may be afraid of every thing; but look at God, as him that is to do all for you, and in you, and then you need be afraid of nothing. A thorn, or no thorn, bad or good blood, with all its effects, loose all their difference, as soon as you know that you are not your own, nor left to yourself to seek a physician, that will not leave you unhealed.
_We know that_ all things must work together for good to _them that love God_. Now what signifies what the things are, if we are to have the same good from them, be they what they will? Let complexion shew itself, let the dead ashes of old sins seem to be ready to come to life again, what is all this, but helping us to be more alive unto God? Therefore rejoice evermore, in every thing give thanks, and call nothing but this, _abstracted contemplation_.
_Farewell._
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