"Salvation is of the LORD." -Jonah 2:9

  "She bare a son, and called his name Samuel, saying, Because I have asked him of the L ORD ." -I Samuel 1:20  [KJV] It is really both blessed and profitable to observe, how holy men of old made memorandums of the Lord's kind dealings with them, as well in providence as grace, by way of preserving alive a due sense of divine mercies upon their souls. A night or two since, the evening portion remarked a beautiful instance of this sort in the case of Hagar: and in the scripture I have brought forth for our present meditation, is another, equally beautiful in the instance of Hannah. In the former, the memorial was set up to perpetuate the place of the Lord's graciousness; in this latter, the dedication is of the person concerning whom divine favour was shewn.     But in both, the design is one and the same, to glorify God. I pause by the way, to-remark, how much to be lamented it is, that this truly scriptural and pious custom is so little followed by christians, and ...

"Thou hast delivered my soul from death."   - Psalm 56:13 [KJV] You may have been delivered from death, as much as David was, but not so fully in the assurance of the deliverance. God may have quickened your soul into life divine; He may have communicated His grace to your heart, and yet you have many doubts and fears whether it be a real work of grace upon your soul. It is not every child of God who has been delivered from death by regenerating grace who can use the words with the confidence expressed here: "Thou hast delivered my soul from death."   But I will shew you when he can.    When God is pleased to bless him with a sense of His pardoning love; when Jesus is revealed to his heart, and manifested with power to his soul; when the blood of sprinkling is applied to purge his conscience from guilt, filth, and dead works, to serve the living God; when the Spirit of adoption is given, and he is enabled to cry, "Abba, Father;" when he can "read his...