17, 1831, My dearest Friend, They have told me that you are not well, and neither time nor distance can take away the feeling of regard and friendship with which I sympathise with all that occurs to you.

I confess myself that I was some time since disposed to look on all things around me with an anxious aspect; but I am beginning to see in _all events_ but a part of that dispensation which is so gloriously distinguished as the work of _love_, and I think that public calamity or private sorrow, sickness, pain, weariness and weakness, _may_ all be translated into the same language, and may be arranged as synonyms of the same word.

Yes! piety, goodness, the favour and approbation of God, are all marked out by sorrow and infirmity here.

Why else did the blessed Jesus tabernacle here below--a man of sorrows?
and why else was he acquainted with grief?
It might make a Christian almost drink his cup of sickness and pain with _greediness_ when he remembers that he is tasting the same cup as that of which his Lord drank, and he might hail with rapture the outstretched arm of death and suffering as about to place on his head the diadem of eternal glory.

I am not to flatter you--you need it not, you ask it not; but, my friend, you must feel and know that you have been walking with God, walking _humbly_, doing good, neither trusting to false presumptions nor to your own merits.