is by His unseen aid and support that the willing are able to overcome obstacles and rise to excellence: remembering this, the just man will be grateful, not proud, at his advancement. That God, too, is the Creator of good and happy circumstances, and of no others, we may see by recurring to the original condition of man, when all outward things were beautiful and delightful, as his inward state was innocent and peaceful. When God had finished the work of creation. He pronounced it "good" and "very good:" there was no evil in existence, without or within. But man, by the abuse of that moral liberty, with which, as man, he was necessarily endowed, perverted his nature, and turned that happy love of others with which he had been originally gifted, and by the possession of which he was an image of his Maker—into self-love. Hence evil and consequent unhappiness began to exist; and from this source, also, came that perversion of outward things (called circumstances), which now so generally exists in the world. Thus man himself is the creator of all evil and perverse circumstances: how unjust then to reproach God for it! If, for instance, our cities are filled with narrow streets or lanes, into which the light and air of heaven can scarce enter, whose fault is it? Says Cowper,
"God made the country, but man made the town."
Is it not from man's own evil that such things exist? In some instances, as in the case of walled towns, this evil has arisen from the necessity of crowding the inhabitants into as small a space as possible, in order to lessen the extent of the walls to be defended. But what made walls necessary? Nothing but men's hostility to each other, which all springs from selfish-
