Cut off, as he was, from all communion with his kind; cast on what was, when he first knew it, literally a barren rock in the midst of the vast Pacific Ocean, Mark found himself, by a very natural operation of causes, in much closer communion with his Creator, than he might have been in the haunts of the world.  On the Reef, there was little to divert his thoughts from their true course; and the very ills that pressed upon him, became so many guides to his gratitude by showing, through the contrasts, the many blessings which had been left him by the mercy of the hand that had struck him.  The nights in that climate and season were much the pleasantest portions of the four-and-twenty hours.  There were no exhalations from decayed vegetable substances or stagnant pools, to create miasma, but the air was as pure and little to be feared under a placid moon as under a noon-day sun.  The first hours of night, therefore, were those in which our solitary man chose to take most of his exercise, previously to his complete restoration to strength; and then it was that he naturally fell into an obvious and healthful communion with the stars.

So far as the human mind has as yet been able to penetrate the mysteries of our condition here on-earth, with the double connection between the past and the future, all its just inferences tend to the belief in an existence of a vast and beneficent design.  We have somewhere heard, or read, that the gipsies believe that men are the fallen angels, oiling their way backward on the fatal path along which hey formerly rushed to perdition.  This may not be, probably is not true in its special detail; but that men are placed here to prepare themselves for a future and higher condition of existence, is not only agreeable to our consciousness, but is in harmony with revelation.  Among the many things that have been revealed to us, where so many are hid, we are told that our information is to increase, as we draw nearer to the millennium, until “The whole earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”  We may be far from that blessed day; probably are; but he has lived in vain, who has dwelt his half century in the midst of the civilization of this our own age, and does not see around him the thousand proofs of the tendency of things to the fulfilment of the decrees, announced to us ages ago by the pens of holy men.  Rome, Greece, Egypt, and all that we know of the past, which comes purely of man and his passions; empires, dynasties, heresies and novelties, come and go like the changes of the seasons; while the only thing that can be termed stable, is the slow but sure progress of prophecy.  The agencies that have been employed to bring about the great ends foretold so many centuries since, are so very natural, that we often lose sight of the mighty truth in its seeming simplicity.  But, the signs of the times are not to be mistaken.  Let any man of fifty, for instance, turn his eyes