did. But he told them they knew not what manner of spirit they were

of; the mission of the Son of man was to save--not to kill.

As a delicate musician shudders to strike a discord, so Jesus would not excite among his little children the tumult of wrath and indignation that would be sure to arise did they fully know the treachery of Judas. He so carried himself that the evil element departed from them without a convulsion, by the calm expulsive force of moral influences. He bore with Judas patiently, sweetly, lovingly, to the very last. He kept the knowledge of his treachery in his own bosom till of his own free will the traitor departed.

There is something so above human nature in this--it is such unworldly sweetness, such celestial patience, that it is difficult for us at our usual level of life to understand it. It is difficult to realize that these expressions of love which Jesus continued to Judas were not a policy, but a simple reality, that he loved and pitied the treacherous friend as a mother loves and pities the unworthy son who is whitening her hair and breaking her heart, and that the kiss he gave was always sincere.

It is an example, too, that may with advantage be studied in conducting the discipline of a church. Here was the worst of criminals meditating the deepest injuries, the worst of crimes, in the very bosom of the infant church, yet our Lord so bore with him, so ruled and guided his little family that there was no quarrel and struggle,--that the very best and most was made of his talents as long as they could be used for good,--and when he departed the church was not rent and torn as a demoniac by the passage from them of an evil spirit.

But there were other respects in which Jesus trained his church, besides that of managing a discordant element within it. There were many who would become disciples from sudden impulse or sympathy, who had not the moral stamina to go on to spiritual perfection. Aware of this, the Master, while ever gracious, ever ready to receive, exacted no binding pledge or oath. He displayed no eagerness to get men to commit themselves in this way, but rather the reverse. Whoever came saying, "Lord, I will follow thee," met a gracious reception. Yet the seeker was warned that he must take up his cross, and that without this he could not be a disciple. He was admonished to count the cost, lest he should begin to build and not be able to finish. In some cases, as that of the young nobleman, the tests proposed were so severe that the man went away sorrowful; and yet, for all this, the heart of the Master was freely open to all who chose to follow him.

But as Jesus would take none without full warning of the stringency of his exactions, so he would retain none a moment beyond the time when their hearts were fully in it. Free they were to come as God's love is free--free also to go, if on trial they found the doctrine or discipline too hard for them. Christ gathered his spiritual army on the principles on which Moses commanded that the army of Israel should be gathered for battle, when proclamation was made that any one who for any reason was not fully in good heart should go home, "What man is fearful or faint-hearted, let him go and return to his house, lest his brethren's heart faint as well as his."

There is a very striking passage in the sixth chapter of John's Gospel, where Jesus, in the most stringent and earnest manner, spoke of the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood; or, in other words, of an appropriating and identifying union of soul with himself as constituting true discipleship. This exposé of the inner depths of real spiritual life repelled some, as it is written:--

"Many, therefore, of his disciples said: This is a hard saying. Who can hear it? When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured, he said: Doth this offend you?... But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who believed not and who should betray him."

From that time, we are told, _many_ of his disciples went back and walked no more with him. They left the church; and we read of no effort to discipline or retain them. The spiritual life of the church expelled them by the law of moral repulsion; they felt they were not of it, and they left, and were suffered to leave. The only comment we read of as being made by the Lord was this: "Then said Jesus to the twelve: Will ye also go away?" There was the door, freely open, would they, too, go? Then said Peter: "Lord, to whom should we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life, and we believe and are sure that thou art the Christ."

We can see here what was the sifting process by which our Lord kept his little church pure. It was the union of vivid spirituality with perfect freedom. The doors of entrance and of exit were freely open; and those who could not bear the intense and glowing spiritual life were at all times free to depart; in the words subsequently used by the Apostle, "they judged themselves unworthy of eternal life." Hence, like a vigorous human body, Christ's little church threw out from itself the unvital members, and kept itself healthy and strong. This perfect freedom to depart at any time constituted the strength of the little order. Its members were held together, not by a dead covenant, not by a conventional necessity, not by past vows uttered in high excitement--but by a living choice of the soul, renewed from moment to moment. Even the twelve had presented to them the choice to go away, and took anew their vow of constancy. Hence it was that even the astounding horrors of the sudden fall--the crucifixion of the Master--did not break their ranks. There were none left but those so vitally united to him, so "one with him" that, as he said, they "lived by him." He was their life; they followed him to the cross and to the grave; they watched the sepulchre, and were ready to meet him in the resurrection morning. It was this tried and sifted remnant to whom he appeared when the doors were closed, after the resurrection, on whom he breathed peace and the Holy Ghost, and whose spiritual judgments and decisions he promised should thereafter be ratified in heaven.

This little company were, as nearly as human beings can be, rooted and grounded in perfect love. The lesson of their lives had been love, taught them by precept from day to day, as he harmonized their contentions and repressed their selfish ambitions; and by example, as he persistently tolerated, loved, bore with a treacherous friend in his own family.

It was necessary that they should be prepared to exercise power, for power was about to be intrusted to them. It was necessary to prepare them to be the governors of the future Christian Church. But he was unwearied in efforts to make them understand that superiority must only be a superiority in doing and suffering for others. When the mother of James and John asked the highest two offices for her two sons, he looked at her with a pathetic sadness. Did she know what she was asking? Did she know that to be nearest to him was to suffer most? He answered: "You know not what you ask. Can you drink of the cup that I shall drink, and be baptized with my baptism?" And when they ignorantly said, "We are able," he said that the place of superiority was not his to give by any personal partiality, but was reserved for the appointment of the Father. But the ambitious spirit now roused had spread to the other disciples. It is said that when the ten heard it they were indignant with James and John. But Jesus called them to him and said:--

"Ye know that they that are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you; but whosoever shall be great among you let him be your minister, and whosoever will be the chiefest let him be servant of all; for even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and give his life a ransom for many."

One of the very last acts of his life, and one of the most affecting comments on these words, was his washing his disciples' feet as a menial servant--a last significant act, which might almost be called a sacrament, since by it he, in view of his dying hour, put this last impressive seal on his teaching of humanity and brotherly love.

The contest which should be the greatest, in spite of all his efforts, all his teachings, all his rebukes, had only smouldered, not been extinguished, and was ready at any moment to flame out again, and all the way up to Jerusalem when he came to die they walked behind him quarreling over this old point. As a dying mother calling her children around her confirms her life-teaching by some last act of love never to be forgotten, so this Master and Friend before the last supper knelt in humility at the feet of each disciple and washed and wiped them, and then interpreted the act as a sign of the spirit in which leadership in his church should be sought: "If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another's feet." In after years the disciples could not but remember that Jesus knelt at the feet of Judas and washed them as meekly as those of all the rest; and then they saw what he meant when he said, "Love your enemies."

From first to last the teaching of Christ was one long teaching of the doctrine and discipline of perfect love. When the multitudes followed him, and he went into a mountain to give his summary of the new dispensation, we hear of no high, mystical doctrines. We hear doctrines against censoriousness, against the habit of judging others. We hear men cautioned to look on their own faults, not on those of others. We hear love like the perfect love of God set up as the great doctrine of the new kingdom--love which no injury, no unworthiness, no selfishness can chill, or alter, or turn aside; which, like God's providence, shines on the evil and unthankful, and sends rain on the just and the unjust--this mystery of love, deeper than the mystery of the Trinity, was what, from first to last, the Master sought to make his little church comprehend.

This love to enemies, this forgiveness, was the hardest of hard doctrines to them. "Lord, how often shall my brother transgress and I forgive him?" says Peter; "till seven times?" "Nay," answers Jesus, "till seventy times seven." "If thy brother trespass against thee seven times a day, and seven times turn again saying, 'I repent,' thou shalt forgive him." The Master taught that no religious ordinance, no outward service, was so important as to maintain love unbroken. If a gift were brought to the altar, and there it were discovered that a brother were grieved or offended, the gift was to be left unoffered till a reconciliation was sought.

It is not merely with the brother who has given us cause of offense, but the brother who, however unreasonably, deems himself hurt by us, that we are commanded to seek reconciliation before we can approach a Heavenly Father.

A band of men and women thus trained in the school of Jesus, careful to look on their own faults, refraining from judging those of others, unselfish and lowly, seeking only to do and to serve, so perfected in a divine love that the most bitter and cruel personal injuries could not move to bitterness or revenge--such a church is in a fit state to administer discipline. It has the Holy Spirit of Jesus with it; and it may be said, without superstitious credulity, of a church in that spirit that its decisions will be so in accordance with the will of God that "whosesoever sins they remit are remitted, and whosesoever sins they retain are retained."

But where have we such a church?

The church of the Master was one of those beautiful ideals, fair as the frost-crystals or the dew-drops of morning. It required a present Jesus to hold it, and then with what constant watchfulness and care and admonition on his part was it kept! We can only study at his marvelous training, and gather some humble inspiration. It was this church of Jesus, the Master, this tried, sifted, suffering body of faithful men and women whose prayers brought down the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, and inaugurated the Apostolic Church.

XXI

JUDAS

It is one of the mysteries in the life of our Lord that he was led by the immediate direction of the Father to incorporate into his little family, and to bring into the closest personal relations with himself, an unsympathetic and adverse element that must have been a source of continual pain to him.

It was after a whole night spent in prayer for the divine direction that the first twelve Apostles were chosen; and Judas also was one of them. The history of this man is a wonder and a warning. That there could possibly be a human being who could have such advantages, could rise to such a height of spiritual power and joy, and yet in the end prove to be utterly without any true spiritual life seems fearful.

It would appear that Judas had at first a sort of worldly enthusiasm for Christ and his kingdom; that he received the divine gift of miracle-working; that he went forth preaching and healing, and felt all the exultation and joy which the sense of spiritual power and influence gives. Judas was among those who returned from the first missionary tour in triumph, saying, "Lord, even the devils were subject unto us!" The grave answer of Jesus reminded them that it was of far more importance to be really accepted of God as true Christians than to have the most brilliant gifts and powers.

In our Lord's first Sermon on the Mount, which may be considered as an ordaining charge to his Apostles, he had said to them that in the great final day of Judgment there would be many who would say unto him, "Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy name cast out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful works? and then will I say to them, I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity." Everywhere in the New Testament these miraculous powers are spoken of as something of far less value than the true Christian spirit, and, if we may trust the word of our Master, many had them whom he will never acknowledge for his own.

But the warning fell on the ear of Judas unheeded. Perhaps he did not himself know how selfish and self-seeking was his zeal for the coming kingdom. Generally speaking, the first person deceived by a man who plays a false part is himself. Judas appears not to have excited the suspicions of the little company of brethren. His shrewdness and tact in managing financial matters led them to appoint him the treasurer of the common family purse. Without doubt, what he saw of the enthusiastic love which Jesus excited, the ease with which he could make people willing to lay their fortunes at his feet, opened to his view dazzling golden visions. He saw himself treasurer of a kingdom unequaled in splendor and riches, when all the kingdoms of the world should be subject to his master. It was more than the reign of Solomon, when gold was to be as the stones of the street.

If we notice our Lord's teachings delivered in the hearing of Judas, we must be struck with the explicit and forcible manner in which he constantly pointed out the danger of the worldly spirit which was growing upon that disciple. How solemn the picture of the rich man, absorbed in plans and calculations how to bestow his great wealth until God says to him, "Thou fool! this night shall thy soul be required of thee--then whose shall those things be that thou hast provided?" "So," he adds, "is every one that layeth up riches, and is not rich towards God." Again, he tells them that it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. He asks them, What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

We hear nothing of any replies that Judas makes to these teachings. He seldom is represented dramatically. Peter, James, John, and Thomas, all present themselves vividly to our mind by the things that they say; but Judas is silent. The Master, who knew him so well, did not expose him to the others. He did not lessen their brotherly regard or interrupt the peace of his little family by any effort at expulsion. As his Father had chosen this member to be in intimate nearness to himself, Jesus accepted him, bore with him, loved him, and treated him to the last with the same unvarying sweetness that he showed to the more congenial natures. It is affecting to remember that the very act by which Christ was betrayed was one that showed that all the external habits of affection remained still unbroken between him and the traitor. The kiss of Jesus was sincere; he loved this wretched man as heavenly beings love, and followed him with love to the last.

It would seem that towards the last part of the life of Jesus the moral antagonism between himself and Judas grew more pronounced and intense.

As the spiritual life of Jesus waxed brighter and stronger, so much the more vivid became the contrast between it and the worldly aims of the traitor. Judas saw the kind of worldly prosperity to which he had aspired receding. He saw that Jesus, instead of using his splendid miraculous powers to draw towards him the chiefs of his nation, was becoming every day more in antagonism with them. Instead of meeting the popular desire to make him a king he had drawn back from it, and by that very act lost many followers. His extreme spiritual teachings had disgusted many of his disciples and led them to go back and walk no more with him. And now the talk of Jesus was more and more of persecutions and sufferings and death, as lying just before him. To a worldly eye all this looked like a fanatical throwing away of the very brightest opportunity for fame and fortune and dominion that ever was given to a leader. Judas became sullenly discontented, not yet ready openly to throw off all hopes of what might be got by adhering to his Master, but yet in a critical and fault-finding spirit surveying all his actions.

It is an awful thought that it was possible for a man to share the daily bread of Jesus, to be in his family, treated as a beloved child, to hear all his beautiful words, to listen to his prayers day after day, and yet, instead of melting, to grow colder and harder--to grow more earthly as his Master grew more heavenly, and to find this want of sympathy slowly hardening into a sullen enmity which only waited its hour to declare itself openly. Christ said to the unbelieving Jews, "Ye have both seen and hated both Me and my Father." Judas was fast preparing to join that party.

According to the narrative of St. Matthew, it was after this rebuke in the matter of Mary that Judas went into negotiations with those who were plotting the destruction of Jesus. He was a disappointed man. He had joined a party which he confidently expected to lead to triumph, success, and wealth. Instead of this, Jesus had lost every opportunity, lost the favorable hour of popularity, and concentrated on himself the hatred of the most powerful men of the nation, and now was talking only of defeat and rejection.

The presence of Judas with the household was now that of a spy, watching his occasion, but making no outward demonstration. He was in the little family circle that gathered in the upper room to eat the last passover supper. His Master bent at his feet and washed them, as he did those of the faithful ones, in that sacramental action when he showed them what he meant by true love. It was directly after this last act of affection that Jesus openly declared his knowledge of the meditated treachery, for he said: "I speak not of you all, I know whom I have chosen; but the Scripture must be fulfilled which saith, He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me." Then with a deep sigh he adds in plain words, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, one of _you_ shall betray me."

It is a most lovely comment on the goodness of heart of these simple men that in so solemn a moment no one of them thought of criminating the other. Each one said tremblingly, "Lord, is it I?"

John, leaning down on his Master's breast, inquired privately who it was; and Jesus gave him a private sign that it should be he to whom he gave a sop when he had dipped it. He dipped the sop, and gave it to Judas. Then Judas, still keeping up the show of innocence, said, like the rest, "Master, is it I?" Jesus answered, "Thou hast said it."

It is said that "Satan entered into him" at this moment. All the smouldering elements of meanness, disgust, dislike of Jesus, his teaching, his spirit, and his mission were quickened by the presence of that invisible enemy who comes to the heart of man only when he is _called_ by the congenial indulgence of wicked passions.

Judas rose hastily, and our Lord added, "That thou doest, do quickly." He flung himself out and was gone.

The miserable sum for which he sold his Master, though inconsiderable in itself, was probably offered as first wages in a new service. His new masters were the heads of Israel: all avenues of patronage and power were in their hands, and the fortune that he could not make on the side of Jesus he might hope to gather on that of his enemies. He may have compounded with his conscience by believing that the miraculous power of our Lord was such that there was no danger of a fatal termination. In fact, that his being taken might force him to declare himself and bring on the triumphant moment of victory. He might possibly have said to himself that he was at any rate acting the part of a mediator in bringing matters to a crisis, and perhaps forcing a favorable result. For, when he found that Jesus was indeed a victim, he was overwhelmed with remorse and despair. He threw the wretched money at the feet of his tempters and departed and hanged himself, and went, as we are told, "to his own place."

He went to the place for which _he_ had fitted himself, who, living in the very bosom of Jesus, had grown more and more unlike him every day. He left Christ--driven by no force but his own wicked will. To the last the love of God pursued him: his Master knelt and washed the very feet that were so soon to hasten to betray him. It was with a sorrowful spirit, a troubled heart, that Jesus said, "Woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed: good were it for that man if he never had been born."

Without attempting to solve the mysteries of this deepest of all tragedies, we may yet see some of the uses and purposes of it in regard to ourselves.

Our Lord was appointed to suffer in all respects as his brethren; and the suffering of bearing with antagonistic and uncongenial natures is one that the providence of God often imposes on us. There are often bound to us, in the closest intimacy of social or family ties, natures hard and ungenial, with whom sympathy is impossible, and whose daily presence necessitates a constant conflict with an adverse influence. There are, too, enemies--open or secret--whose enmity we may feel yet cannot define. Our Lord, going before us in this hard way, showed us how we should walk.

It will be appropriate to the solemn self-examination of the period of Lent to ask ourselves, Is there any false friend or covert enemy whom we must learn to tolerate, to forbear with, to pity and forgive? Can we in silent offices of love wash their feet as our Master washed the feet of Judas? And if we have no real enemies, are there any bound to us in the relations of life whose habits and ways are annoying and distasteful to us? Can we bear with them in love? Can we avoid harsh judgments, and harsh speech, and the making known to others our annoyance? Could we through storms of obloquy and evil report keep calmly on in duty, unruffled in love, and commending ourselves to the judgment of God? The examination will probably teach us to feel the infinite distance between us and our divine Ideal, and change censoriousness of others into prayer for ourselves.

XXII

GOING UP TO JERUSALEM

_Palm Sunday_

Nothing in ancient or modern tragedy is so sublime and touching as the simple account given by the Evangelists of the last week of our Lord's earthly life.

The church has since his ascension so devoutly looked upon him as God that we are in danger of losing the pathos and the power which come from a consideration of his humanity. The Apostle tells us that, in order that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest, he was made in all respects like unto his brethren. He was a Jew. His national and patriotic feeling was intense. To him the sacred nation, the temple service, with all its hymns and prayers and ancient poetic recollections, were more dear than to any other man of his nation. The nation was his own, his peculiar, chosen people; he was their head and flower, for whom the whole gorgeous ritual had been appointed, for whom the nation had been for centuries waiting. Apart from his general tenderness and love for humanity was this special love of country and countrymen. Then there was the love of his very own--the little church of tried, true, tested friends who had devoted themselves to him; and, still within that, his family circle, for whom his love was strong as a father's, tender and thoughtful as a mother's. And yet Jesus went through life bearing in his bosom the bitter thought that his nation would reject him and instigate one of his own friends to betray him, and that all seeming success and glory was to end in a cruel and shameful death. He foresaw how every heart that loved him would be overwhelmed and crushed with a misery beyond all human precedent.

It is affecting to read in the Evangelists how often and how earnestly Jesus tried to make his disciples realize what was coming. "Let this saying sink down into your ears," he would say: "the Son of man shall be delivered into the hands of men;" and then would recount, item by item, the overthrow, the agonies, the insults, the torture, that were to be the end of his loving and gentle mission. At various times and in various forms he took them aside and repeated this prophecy. And it is said that they "understood not his word;" that "they were astonished;" that they "feared to ask him;" that they "questioned one with another what this should mean." It seems probable that, warmed with the flush of present and increasing prosperity and popularity, witnessing his victorious miracles, they had thrown this dark prophecy by, as something inexplicable and never literally to be accomplished. What it could mean they knew not, but that it could have a literal fulfillment they seem none of them to have even dreamed. Perhaps they were like many of us, in our religion, in the habit of looking only on the bright, hopeful, and easily comprehensible side of things, and letting all that is dark and mysterious slide from the mind.

Up to the very week before his crucifixion the power and popularity of Jesus seemed constantly increasing. His miracles were more open, more impressive, more effective. The raising of Lazarus from the dead had set the final crown on the glorious work. It would appear that Lazarus was a member of a well-known, influential family, moving in the higher circles of Jerusalem. It was a miracle wrought in the very heart and centre of knowledge and influence, and it raised the fame of the new prophet to the summit of glory. It is an affecting comment on the worth of popular favor that the very flood-tide of the fame and glory of Jesus was just five days before he was crucified. On Monday--the day now celebrated in the Christian Church as Palm Sunday--he entered Jerusalem in triumph, with palms waving, and garlands thrown at his feet, and the multitudes going before and after, shouting Hosanna to the Son of David; and on Friday of the same week the whole multitude shouted, "Away with him! Crucify him! Release unto us Barabbas! His blood be upon us and upon our children!" and he was led through those same streets to Calvary. On these six days before the death of Jesus the historians have expended a wealth of detail, so that the record of what is said and done is more than that of all the other portions of that short life.

There are many touches of singular tenderness conveyed in very brief words. Speaking of his final journey from Galilee to Judæa, says one: "When the time came that he should be received up he set his face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem." Another narrates that when he was going up to Jerusalem he walked before his disciples, and as they followed him they were afraid. Evidently he was wrapped in an electric cloud of emotion; he was swept along by a mighty influence--tides of feeling deeper than they could comprehend were rolling in his soul, and there was that atmosphere of silence and mystery about him by which the inward power of great souls casts an outward sphere of awe about them. Still, as they walked behind, they had their political dreams of a coming reign of power and splendor, when the Judæan nation should rule the world, and they, as nearest to the Master, should administer the government of the nation--for it is said, by the way they "disputed who should be the greatest."

He hears their talk, as a dying mother, who knows that a few hours will leave her children orphans, listens to the contentions of the nursery. He turns to them and makes a last effort to enlighten them--to let them know that not earthly glory and a kingdom are before them, but cruelty, rejection, shame, and death. He recounts the future, circumstantially, and with what deep energy and solemn pathos of voice and manner may be imagined. They make no answer, but shrink back, look one on another, and are afraid to ask more. It would seem, however, that there was _one_ in the band on whom these words made an impression. Judas evidently thought that, if this was to be the end of all, he had been taken in and deceived: a sudden feeling of irritation arises against One who having such evident and splendid miraculous power is about to give up in this way and lose his opportunity and suffer himself to be defeated. Judas is all ready now to make the best terms for himself with the winning party. The others follow in fear and trembling. The strife who shall be greatest subsides into a sort of anxious questioning.

They arrive at a friendly house where they are to spend the Sabbath, the last Sabbath of his earthly life. There was a feast made for him, and we see him surrounded by grateful friends. By the fact that Martha waited on the guests and that Lazarus sat at the table it would appear that this feast was in the house of a relative of that family. It is said to have occurred in the house of "Simon the Leper"--perhaps the leper to whom Jesus said, "I will--be thou clean."

Here Mary, with the abandon which marks her earnest and poetic nature, breaks a costly vase of balm and sheds the perfume on the head of her Lord. It was an action in which she offered up her whole self--her heart and her life--to be spent for him, like that fleeting perfume. Judas expostulates, "To what purpose is this waste?" There is an answering flash from Jesus, like lightning from a summer cloud. The value that our Lord sets upon love is nowhere more energetically expressed. This trembling, sensitive heart has offered itself up wholly to him, and he accepts and defends it. There is a touch of human pathos in the words, "She is anointing me for my burial." Her gift had all the sacredness in his eyes of a death-bed act of tenderness, and he declares, "Wheresoever through the world this gospel shall be preached, there also shall what this woman hath done be told for a memorial of her."

Judas slinks back, sullen and silent. The gulf between him and his Master grows hourly more palpable--as the nature that cannot love and the nature to whom love is all come in close collision. Judas and Christ cannot blend any more than oil and water, and the nearer approach only makes the conflict of nature more evident.

On Monday morning, the day that we now celebrate as Palm Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem. We are told that the great city, now full of Jews come up from all parts of the world, was moved about him. We have in the Book of Acts an enumeration of the varieties in the throng that filled Jerusalem at this time: "Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia and in Judæa and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and Proselytes, Cretes and Arabians." When all these strangers heard the shouting, it is said the "whole city was moved, saying, Who is this? And the multitude said, This is Jesus, the Prophet of Nazareth in Galilee."

And what was He thinking of, as he came thus for the last time to the chosen city? We are told "And when he drew near and beheld the city, he wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou in this thy day, the things that belong to thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes." Then follows the prophetic vision of the destruction of Jerusalem--scenes of horror and despair for which his gentle spirit bled inwardly.

One feature of the picture is touching: the children in the temple crying, "Hosanna to the Son of David!" The love of Jesus for children is something marked and touching. When he rested from his labors at eventide, it was often, we are told, with a little child in his arms--children were his favorite image for the heavenly life, and he had bid the mothers to bring them to him as emblems of the better world. The children were enthusiastic for him, they broke forth into rapture at his coming as birds in the sunshine, loud and noisily as children will, to the great discomfiture of priests and Scribes. "Master! bid them hush," they said. He turned, indignant--"If these should hold their peace the very stones would cry out." These evidences of love from dear little children were the last flower thrown at the feet of Jesus on his path to death. From that day the way to the cross was darker every hour.

XXIII

THE BARREN FIG-TREE

_Monday in Passion Week_

During the last week of the life of Jesus we see him under the most awful pressure of emotion; the crisis of a great tragedy, which has been slowly gathering and growing from the beginning of the world, is now drawing on. The nation that he had chosen--that he had borne and carried through all the days of old--was now to consummate her ruin in his rejection. All his words and actions during the last week of his life were under the shadow of that cloud of doom which overhung the city of Jerusalem, the temple, and the people whom he had loved, so earnestly and so long, in vain.

When going up to Jerusalem he walked before his disciples, silent and absorbed; and they dared scarcely speak to him. Amid the triumphant shouts of the people that welcomed him to the city he paused on the verge of Olivet and wept over it. He saw the siege, the famine, the terror of women and helpless children, the misery and despair, the unutterable agonies of the sacking of Jerusalem, which has been a world's wonder; and he broke forth in lamentation. "Oh, that thou hadst known--even thou in this thy day--the things that belong to thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes."

All his discourses of this last week are shaded with the sad coloring and prophetic vision of coming doom, of a crime hastening to fulfillment that should bring a long-delayed weight of wrath and vengeance.

His parables now turn on this theme. One day they tell of a husbandman intrusting a vineyard to the care of faithless servants; he sends messengers to overlook them; they beat one and stone another, till finally he sends his only and beloved son, and then they say, "Let us kill him;" and they catch him and cast him out of the vineyard and slay him. "What," he asks, "shall the Lord of the vineyard do to these husbandmen?" Again, he speaks of a feast to which all are generously invited, and all neglect or reject the invitation, and not only reject but insult and despise and ill-treat the messengers who bear the invitation; and tells how the insulted King sends the invitation to others, and decrees, "None of these men shall taste of my supper." He tells of a wedding feast, and of foolish virgins who slumber with unfilled lamps till the door of welcome is shut. He tells of a king, who, having intrusted talents to his servants, comes again to reckon, and takes away the talent of the unfaithful one and casts him to outer darkness.

All these themes speak of the approaching rejection of the nation on whom God has heaped so many favors for many years. The thought of their doom seems to press down the heart of the Redeemer.

The twenty-third chapter of Matthew contains Christ's last sermon in the temple--his final words of leave-taking of his people; and a most dreadful passage it is. It is awful, it is pathetic, to compare those fearful words with his first benignant announcement at Nazareth. Nothing in human language can be conceived more terrible than these last denunciations of the rejected Lord and Lover of the chosen race. He exposes with scathing severity the hypocrisy, the greed, the cruelty of the leaders of the nation; he denounces them as the true descendants of those who of old killed God's prophets and stoned his messengers, and ends by rising into the very majesty of the Godhead in declaring their final doom:--

"Fill ye up the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents! Ye generation of vipers! How can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets and wise men and scribes; and some of them ye shall kill and crucify, and some of them ye shall scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city. That upon you might come all the righteous blood shed upon earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zacharias,[5] the son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you all these shall come upon this generation!

"O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! thou that killest the prophets and stonest those that are sent unto thee--how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings--and ye would not. Behold, your house is left unto you desolate, for I say that ye shall see me no more henceforth till ye say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord."

[5] See 2 Chronicles xxiv. 20, 21.

"And the spirit of the Lord came upon Zechariah, the son of Jehoida the priest, who stood among the people, and said, Why transgress ye the commandments of the Lord, that ye cannot prosper? Because ye have forsaken the Lord he also hath forsaken you. And they conspired against him and stoned him with stones in the court of the house of the Lord."

These two instances, of Abel and Zacharias, cited by our Lord from the very first and very last of the sacred historic books, seemed to cover the whole ground of their history. The variation as to the name of the prophet's father has many theories to account for it, any one of which is satisfactory.

This was Christ's last farewell--his valedictory to those whom he had loved and labored for, and who would not come to him that he might give them life.

To all these awful words was added the language of an awful symbol. In one of his parables our Lord had spoken of the Jewish nation under the figure of a tree which, though carefully tended year by year, bore no fruit. At last the word goes forth, "Cut it down!" But the keeper of the vineyard intercedes and prays that it may have a longer space of cultured care, and so be brought to fruit-bearing. This last week of our Lord's life he sets forth the solemn close of that parable by one of those symbolic acts common among the old prophets and well understood by the Jews.

Approaching a fair and promising tree on his way into the city, he seeks fruit thereon, but finds it barren. There is a pause, and then a voice of deep sadness says, "No fruit grow on thee henceforth and forever!" and immediately the fig-tree withered away.

It was an outward symbol of that doomed city whose day of mercy was past. The awfulness of these last words and of this last significant sign is increased by the tenderness of Him who gave them forth. It is the Fountain of Pity, the All-Loving One, that uttered the doom--a doom made certain and inevitable not by God's will but by man's perversity.

The lesson that we have to learn is the reality and awfulness of sin, the reality of that persistence in wickedness that can make even the love of Jesus vain for our salvation. For what hope, what help, what salvation can there be for those who cannot be reached by His love? If they have seen and hated both him and his Father--what remains?

XXIV

CAIAPHAS

_Tuesday in Passion Week_

The thought may arise to many minds, if Jesus was so lovely, so attractive, and so beloved, how could it have been possible that he should be put to so cruel a death in the very midst of a people whom he loved and for whom he labored?

The sacred record shows us why. It was this very attractiveness, this very power over men's hearts, that was the cause and reason of the conspiracy against Jesus. We have a brief and very dramatic account of the meeting of the Sanhedrim in which the death of Christ was finally resolved upon, and we find that very popularity urged as a reason why he cannot be permitted to live. In John xi. 47, we are told that after the raising of Lazarus the chief priests and Pharisees gathered a council and said, "What do we? this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone all men will believe on him, and the Romans will come and take away our place and nation."

There is the case stated plainly, and we see that these men talked then just as men in our days talk. Do they ever resolve on an act of oppression or cruelty, calling it by its right name? Never. It is a "sacrifice" to some virtue; and the virtue in this case was patriotism.

Here is the Jewish nation, a proud and once powerful people, crushed and writhing under the heel of the conquering Romans. They are burning with hatred of their oppressors and with a desire of revenge, longing for the Messiah that shall lead them to conquest and make their nation the head of the world.

And now, here comes this Jesus and professes to be the long-promised leader; and what does he teach? Love and forgiveness of enemies; patient endurance of oppression and wrong; and supreme devotion to the pure inner life of the soul. If Roman tax-gatherers distrain upon their property and force them to carry it from place to place, they are to meet it only by free good will, that is, willingness to go two miles when one is asked. If the extortionate officer seizes their coat, they are to show only a kindliness that is willing to give even more than that.

They are to love their bitterest enemies, pity and pray for them, and continue in unbroken kindness, even as God's sunshine falls in unmoved benignity on the just and the unjust!

It must have inflamed these haughty, ambitious leaders to fury to see all their brilliant visions of war and conquest and national independence melting away in a mist of what seemed to them the mere impossible sentimentalism of love. And yet this illusion gains ground daily; Christ is received in triumph at Jerusalem, and the rulers say to each other, "Perceive ye how we prevail nothing? behold the whole world is gone out after him."

Now, in the Jewish Sanhedrim Christ had friends and followers. We are told of Joseph of Arimathea, who would not consent to the deeds of the council. We are told of Nicodemus, who before now had spoken boldly in the council, demanding justice and a fair hearing for Jesus. We may well believe that so extreme a course as was now proposed met at first strong opposition. There seems to have been some warm discussion. We may imagine what it was: that Jesus was a just and noble man, a prophet, a man all of whose deeds and words had been pure and beneficent, was doubtless earnestly urged. The advocates, it is true, were not men who had left all to follow him, or enrolled themselves openly as his disciples, but yet they could not consent to so monstrous an injustice as this. That the discussion produced strong feeling is evident from the excited manner in which Caiaphas sums up: "Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is better that one man should die than that the whole nation should perish." That was the case as he viewed it, and he talked precisely as men in our days have often talked when consenting to an injustice or oppression: Say what you will of this Jesus; I will not dispute you. Admit, if you please, his virtues and good works; still, he is a wrong-headed man, that will be the ruin of our nation. Either he must perish or the nation be destroyed.

And so, on the altar of patriotism this murder was laid as a sacrifice. And it was this same burning, impatient national spirit of independence that slew Christ which afterwards provoked the Roman government beyond endurance, and brought upon Jerusalem wrath to the uttermost.

The very children and grandchildren of Caiaphas died in untold miseries in that day of wrath and doom. The decision to reject Christ was the decision which destroyed Jerusalem with a destruction more awful than any other recorded in history.

We are apt to consider the actors in this great tragedy as sinners above all others. But every day and every hour in our times just such deeds are being reënacted.

There were all sorts of sinners in that tragedy: Caiaphas, who sacrificed one whom he knew to be a noble and good man to political ambition; Pilate, who consented to an acknowledged wrong from dread of personal inconvenience; Judas, who made the best of his time in selling out a falling cause to the newcomers; Peter, the impetuous friend suddenly frightened into denial; the twelve, forsaking and fleeing in a moment of weakness; the multitude of careless spectators, those tide-waiters who turn as the flood turns, who shouted for Jesus yesterday because others were shouting, and turn against him to-day because he is unpopular. All these were there. On the other hand, there were the faithful company of true-hearted women that went with Jesus weeping on his way to the cross; that beloved disciple and the Mother that stood by him to the last; all these, both friends and foes, represent classes of people who still live and still act their part in this our day.

"For, when under fierce oppression, Goodness suffers like transgression, Christ again is crucified; But if love be there true-hearted, By no pain or terror parted, Mary stands the cross beside!"

XXV

THE JOY OF CHRIST

_Wednesday in Passion Week_

The last chapters of St. John--in particular from the thirteenth to the seventeenth--are worthy, more than anything else in the sacred writings, of the designation which has been given them, The Heart of Jesus. They are the language of the most intimate love, to the most intimate friends, in view of the greatest and most inconceivable of human sorrows. For, though the disciples--poor, humble, simple men--were dazed, confused, and misty up to the very moment when they were entering upon the greatest sorrow of their life, the Master who was leading them saw it all with perfect clearness. He saw perfectly not only the unspeakable humiliation and anguish that were before himself, but the disappointment, the terror, the dismay, the utter darkness and despair that were just before these humble, simple friends who had invested all their love and hope in him.

When we think of this it will seem all the more strange, the more unworldly and divine to find that in these very chapters our Lord speaks more often, and with more emphasis, of JOY than in any other part of the New Testament. In the fifteenth he says, "These things have I spoken unto you that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." And again, in his prayer for them, he says, "And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves." He speaks of his joy as a treasure he longed to impart--as something which overflowed his own soul, and sought to equalize itself by flowing into the souls of his friends. He was not only full of joy, but he had fullness of joy to give away.

This joy of Christ in the approach of extremest earthly anguish and sorrow is one of the beautiful mysteries of our faith. It is a holy night-flower, opening only in darkness, and shedding in the very shadow of death light and perfume; or like the solemn splendor of the stars, to be seen only in the deepest darkness.

In the representations made of our Lord as a man of sorrows we are too apt to forget the solemn emphasis with which he asserts this fullness of joy. But let us look at his position on the mere human side. At the hour when he thus spoke he knew that, so far as the salvation of his nation was concerned, his life-work had been a failure. His own people had rejected him and had bargained with a member of his own family to betray him. He knew the exact details of the scourging, the scoffing, the taunts, the torture, the crucifixion; and to a sensitive soul the hour of approach to a great untried agony is often the hour of bitterest trial. It is when we foresee a great trouble in the dimness of to-morrow that our undisciplined hearts grow faint and fail us. But he who had long foreseen--who had counted in advance--every humiliation, every sorrow, and every pain, spoke at the same time of his joy as an overflowing fullness. He spoke of his peace as something which he had a divine power to give away. The world saw that night a new sight--a sufferer who had touched the extreme of all earthly loss and sorrow, who yet stood, like a God, offering to give Peace and Joy--even fullness of joy. For our Lord intensifies the idea. He wants his children not to have joy merely, but to be full of joy. This is the meaning of the words to "have my joy fulfilled in them."

We shall see in the affecting history of the next few hours of the life of Jesus that this heavenly joy was capable of a temporary obscuration. He was aware that a trial was coming from a direct collision with the Evil Spirit. "The Prince of this world cometh, but hath nothing in me."

Yet we cannot but feel that the mysterious agonies of Gethsemane, that wrung the blood-drops from his heart, were in part due to that conflict with cruel and malignant spirits. It is the greatest possible help to our poor sorrowful nature that these struggles, these strong cryings and bitter tears of our Lord, have been recorded, because it helps us to feel that he was not peaceful because he was passionless--that his joy and peace did not come from the serenity of a nature incapable of sorrow and struggles like ours. There are passages in the experience of such saints as Madame Guyon that seem like the unnatural exaltations of souls exceptionally indifferent to circumstances; nothing makes any difference to them; one thing is just as good as another. But in the experience of Jesus we see our own most shrinking human repellencies. We see that there were sufferings that he dreaded with his whole soul; sorrows which he felt to be beyond even his power of endurance; and so when he said, "Not my will, but Thy will," he said it with full vision of what he was accepting; and in that unshaken, that immovable oneness of will with the Father lay the secret of his joy and victory.

It is a great and solemn thing for us to think of this joy of Christ in sorrow. It is something that we can know only in and by sorrow. But sorrows are so many in this world of ours! Griefs, sickness, disappointment, want, death, so beset our footsteps that it is worth everything to us to think of that joy of Christ that is brightest as the hour grows darkest. It is a gift. It is not in us. We cannot get it by any human reasonings or the mere exercise of human will, but we can get it as a free gift from Jesus Christ.

If in the hour of his deepest humiliation and suffering he had joy and peace to give away, how much more now, when he is exalted at the right hand of God, to give gifts unto men! Poor sorrowful, suffering, struggling souls, Christ longs to comfort you. "I will give to him that is athirst the water of life freely." "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

XXVI

GETHSEMANE

_Thursday in Passion Week_

There are times in life when human beings are called to sorrows that seem so hopeless, so cruel, that they take from the spirit all power of endurance. There are agonies that overwhelm, that crush,--their only language seems to be a groan of prostrate anguish. There are distresses against which the heart cries out, "It is too much. I cannot, cannot bear it. God have mercy on me!"

It was for people who suffer thus, for those who are capable of such depths and who are called to go through them, that the great Apostle and High Priest of our profession passed through that baptism of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Apostle says, "It became him for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons and daughters unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through suffering." And it was at this hour and time that he was to pass through such depths that no child of his could ever go deeper. Alone, and without the possibility of human sympathy, he was to test those uttermost distresses possible to the most exceptional natures. Jesus suffered _all_ that he could endure and live. The record is given with great particularity by three Evangelists, and is full of mysterious suggestion. Up to this period all the discourses of our Lord, in distinct view of his final sufferings, had been full of calmness and courage. He had consoled his little flock, and bid them not be troubled, speaking cheerfully of a joy that should repay the brief anguish of separation. He not only was wholly at peace in his own soul, but felt that he had peace in abundance to give away. "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

Yet he went forth from speaking these very words, and this is the account of the scene that followed, collated from the three Evangelists:--

"Then cometh Jesus with them unto the place that is called Gethsemane, and said to his disciples, Sit ye here while I go and pray yonder. And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy (in extreme anguish). And he said unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here and watch with me, and pray that ye enter not into temptation. And he went forward a little, and fell on his face and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him, saying, My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt. And he cometh unto his disciples and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What! could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. He went away again the second time, and prayed, and said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what thou wilt. O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me except I drink it, thy will be done. And he came and found them asleep again; for their eyes were heavy, neither wist they what to answer him. And he left them and went away the third time, and prayed, saying the same words. And, being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood, falling down to the ground, and there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him.

"And when he rose up from prayer and was come to his disciples, he findeth them sleeping for sorrow, and saith unto them, Sleep on now--rest."

There seems here evidence that the anguish, whatever it was, had passed, and that Jesus had returned to his habitual peace. He looks with pity on the poor tired followers whose sympathy had failed him just when he most needed it, and says, "Poor souls, let them sleep for a little and rest."

After an interval he rouses them. "It is enough--the hour is come; the Son of man is betrayed into the hand of sinners. Rise up; let us go: behold, he is at hand that doth betray me."

The supposition that it was the final agony of the cross which Jesus prayed to be delivered from is inconsistent with his whole life and character. He had kept that end in view from the beginning of his life. He said, in view of it, "I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!" He rebuked Peter in the sharpest terms for suggesting that he should avoid those predicted sufferings. Going up to Jerusalem to die, he walked before the rest, as if impelled by a sacred ardor to fulfill his mission. Furthermore, in the Epistle to the Hebrews we are taught thus: the writer says, speaking of the Saviour, "Who in the days of his flesh offered up prayers with strong crying and tears to him that was able to save him from death, and _was heard_ in that he feared." Whatever relief it was that our Lord supplicated with such earnestness, it was given; and he went forth from the dreadful anguish in renewed and perfect peace.

We may not measure the depths of that anguish or its causes. Our Lord gives some intimation of one feature in it by saying, as he prepared to go forth to it, "The Prince of this World cometh, and hath nothing in me;" and in warning his disciples, "Pray that ye enter not into temptation." The expression employed by St. Mark to describe the anguish is indicative of a sudden rush--of an amazement, as if a new possibility of suffering, overwhelming and terrible, had been disclosed to him, such a sorrow as it seemed must destroy life--"exceeding sorrowful, even unto death."

Let these words remain in all their depths, in all their mystery, as standing for that infinite possibility of pain which the one divine Man was to taste for every man. There have been facts in human experience analogous. We are told that the night before his execution, Jerome of Prague, in his lonely prison, condemned and held accursed by the proud Scribes and Pharisees, the Christian Sanhedrim of his times, fainted and groaned and prayed as Jesus in Gethsemane. Martin Luther has left on record a wonderful prayer, written the night before the Diet of Worms, when he, a poor, simple monk, was called before the great Diet of the Empire to answer for his faith. Such strong crying and tears--such throbbing words--that seem literally like drops of blood falling down to the ground, attest that Luther was passing through Gethsemane. Alone, with all the visible power of the Church and the world against him, his position was like that of Jesus. A crisis was coming when he was to witness for truth, and he felt that only God was for him, and he appeals to him: "Hast thou not chosen me to do this work? I ask thee, O God, O thou my God, where art thou? Art thou dead? No, thou canst not die; thou art only hiding thyself."

In many private histories there are Gethsemanes. There are visitations of sudden, overpowering, ghastly troubles,--troubles that transcend all ordinary human sympathy, such as the helpless human soul has to wrestle with alone. And it was because in this blind struggle of life such crushing experiences are to be meted out to the children of men that Infinite Love provided us with a divine Friend who had been through the deepest of them all, and come out victorious.

In the sudden wrenches which come by the entrance of death into our family circles, there is often an inexplicable depth of misery that words cannot tell. No outer words can tell what a trial is to the soul. Only Jesus, who, as the Head of the human race, united in himself every capability of human suffering, and proved them all, in order that he might help us, only he has an arm strong enough and a voice tender enough to reach us. The stupor of the disciples in the agony of Jesus is a sort of parable or symbol of the inevitable _loneliness_ of the deepest kind of sorrow. There are friends, loving, honest, true, but they cannot watch with us through such hours. It is like the hour of death--nobody can go with us. But he who knows what it is so to suffer; he who has felt the horror, the amazement, the heart-sick dread--who has fallen on his face overcome, and prayed with cryings and tears and the bloody sweat of agony--he can understand us and can help us. He can send an angel from heaven to comfort us when every human comforter is "sleeping for sorrow." It was Gethsemane which gave Jesus the power to bring many sons and daughters unto glory.

And it may comfort us under such trials to hope that as he thus gained an experience and a tenderness which made him mighty to comfort and to save, so we, in our humbler measure, may become comforters to others. When the experience is long past, when the wounds of the heart are healed, then we may find it good to have drank of Christ's cup, and gone down in that baptism with him. We may find ourselves with hearts tenderer to feel, and stronger to sustain others; even as the Apostle says, he "comforteth us in all our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort them that are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God."

XXVII

THE LAST WORDS OF JESUS

_Good Friday_

A peculiar sacredness always attaches to the words of the dying. In that lonely pass between the here and the hereafter the meanest soul becomes in a manner a seer, and a mysterious interest invests it. But the last utterances of great and noble spirits, of minds of vast feeling and depth, are of still deeper significance. The last utterances of great men would form a pathetic collection and a food for deep ponderings. It is no wonder, then, that the traditions of the Christian Church have attached a special value to the last words of Jesus on the cross.

The last words of Socrates, reported by Plato, have had an undying interest. These words were spoken in the bosom of sympathizing friends and in the enjoyment of physical quiet and composure. Death was at hand; but it was a death painless and easy, and undisturbing to the flow of thought or emotion.

The death of Jesus, on the contrary, was death with every aggravation and horror which could make it fearful. There was everything to torture the senses and to obscure the soul. It was a whirl of vulgar obloquy and abuse, confusing to the spirit, and following upon protracted exhaustion from sleeplessness and suffering of various kinds for long hours.

In the case of most human beings we might wish to hide our eyes from the sight of such an agony; we might refuse to listen to what must be the falterings and the weaknesses of a noble spirit overwhelmed and borne down beyond the power of human endurance. But no such danger attends the listening to the last words on Calvary. They have been collected into a rosary embodying the highest Christian experience possible to humanity, the most signal victory of love over pain and of good over evil that the world's history presents.

During Passion Week in Rome no services are more impressive than those of the seven "last words," with the hymns, prayers, and exhortations accompanying them. To us the mere quotation of them, unattended by sermon or hymn or prayer, is a litany of awful power. Have we ever pondered these as they were spoken in their order in the words of the simple Gospel narrative?

"And when they came to the place that is called Calvary, there they crucified him and the malefactors, the one on his right hand and the other on his left. Then said Jesus, _Father, forgive them; they know not what they do_." This is the first word. Against physical violence and pain there is in us all a reaction of the animal nature which expresses itself often in the form of irritation. Thus, in strong, undisciplined natures, the first shock of physical torture brings out a curse, and it is only after an interval that reason and conscience gain the ascendency and make the needed allowance. In these strange words of Jesus we feel that there is the sharp shock of a new sense of pain, but it wrings from him only prayer. This divine sweetness of love was unvanquished; the habit of tenderness and consideration for the faults of others furnished an instant plea. The poor brutal Roman soldiers--they know not what they do! The foolish multitude who three days before shouted "Hosanna," and now shout "Crucify"--they know not what they do! How strange to the Roman soldiers must those words have sounded, if they understood them! "What manner of man is this?" It is not surprising that tradition numbers these poor soldiers among the earliest converts to Jesus.

The second utterance was on this wise:--

"And the people that stood beholding, and the rulers also with them, derided him, saying, He saved others; let him save himself, if he be Christ, the chosen of God. And the soldiers also mocked him, coming to him and offering him vinegar; and one of the malefactors railed on him, saying, If thou be the Son of God, save thyself and us. But the other answering, rebuked him, saying, Dost thou not fear God, seeing that thou art in the same condemnation?--and we, indeed, justly, for we receive the reward of our deeds; but this man hath done nothing amiss. And he said to Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, _Verily, I say unto thee, to-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise_."

Still unvanquished by pain, he is even with his last breath pronouncing words of grace and consolation for the guilty and repentant! He is mighty to save even in his humiliation!

The third utterance is recorded by St. John as follows:--

"Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus, therefore, saw his mother standing, and the disciple whom he loved, he said to his mother, _Woman, behold thy son_, and to the disciple, _Son, behold thy mother_."

Thus far, every utterance of Jesus has been one of thoughtful consideration for others, of prayer for his enemies, of grace and pardon to the poor wretch by his side, and of tenderness to his mother and disciple. But in tasting death for every man our Lord was to pass through a deeper experience; he was to know the sufferings of the darkened brain, which, clogged and impeded by the obstructed circulation, no longer afforded a clear medium for divine communion. He was to suffer the eclipse which the animal nature in its dying state can interpose between the soul and God. Three hours we are told had passed, when there was darkness over all the land, like that that was slowly gathering over the head of the suffering Lord. "And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, _Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani_, which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Those words, from the Psalm of David, come now as the familiar language expressive of that dreadful experience to which the whole world looks as its ransom:--

"After that, Jesus said, _I thirst_. And one ran and filled a sponge full of vinegar and put it on a reed and gave him to drink. And when he had received the vinegar, he said, _It is finished_, and he bowed his head."

What we read of his last utterance is that "he cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost." This last loud utterance was in the words, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

It is the interpretation that the church has given to these last words that they betokened a sudden flame of joyful perception, such as sometimes lights up the brain at the dying moment, after it has been darkened by the paralysis of death. As he said, "It is finished," light, and joy, and hope, flushed his soul, and with this loud cry of victory and joy, it departed like a ray of heavenly light to the bosom of the Father.

Such were the seven "last utterances" of Jesus--and when can we hope to attain to what they teach? When shall _we_ be so grounded in Love that no tumult or jar of outward forces, no insults, no physical weariness, exhaustion, or shock of physical pain, shall have power to absorb us in selfishness, or make us forgetful of others? When shall pity and prayer be the only spontaneous movement of our hearts when most hurt and injured--pierced in the tenderest nerve? When shall thoughtfulness for others, and divine pity for degraded natures, be the immovable habit of our souls? How little of _self_ and its sufferings in these last words; how much of pity and love--the pity and love of a God!

Could we but learn life's lessons by them, then will come at last to us the final hour, when, _our_ trial being completed, we shall say "It is finished," and pass like him to the bosom of the Father.

XXVIII

THE DARKEST HOUR

_Good Friday Evening_

What is the darkest hour to us when our friends die? Not the dying hour; for then love has some last act, some last word to receive, some comfort to give, some service to render, that diverts from the bitterness of pain. Not even when the eyes are closed forever, and the face is fixed in marble stillness; for still we gather at the side of the cold clay and feel as if there were something left us of our love. But when we have carried our dear ones to the grave, and seen the doors of the sepulchre shut between them and us, and come back to the house where they are no more--where they never more may be--_then_ is indeed the darkest hour.

There is a very touching picture by Delaroche entitled "The Return from the Cross," in which the mother of Jesus, leaning on the arm of the beloved John, is seen just entering a lowly dwelling. A few faithful friends, men and women, are with them; they have seen him die--seen him laid in the sepulchre and a great stone rolled against the door; and now they are come to their desolate home to think it all over, and to weep.

Do we ask, Why did they not remember the words of Jesus, that he should rise again? Ah! because they had just such hearts as we have, and their faith was overpowered by sight just as ours is.

They may have thought they believed that they should see their Lord risen from the dead; but at the sight of the death agonies, and the lifeless form, and the dark, cold stone of the sepulchre, all this poor faith died in darkness. It was like carrying a taper out into a tempest. And we, when we lay our dear ones in the grave, say in solemn words that we do it "in sure and certain hope of a blessed and glorious resurrection," when what is sown in weakness shall be raised in power, what is sown in dishonor shall be raised in glory. We say it, and we think we believe it; but does it really then cheer us? Does it dry our tears? Does it make the return to our desolated home any less dreadful?

Still we remember the death-bed, the pains, the dying eyes, the weakness, the sinking--we are overwhelmed by sorrow, and our souls ache as with a wound. Our hearts throb and yearn towards the form we can no longer see or embrace, as if the loved one were a portion of our own selves that had been violently torn away, leaving us fainting and bleeding to death. All this--more than all this--was in the sorrow of the home of Mary and John that darkest of all nights.

He they mourned was not merely friend, but Lord and Leader, the Hope of Israel; the hope of the world; and God had let him suffer and die thus!

It was true that Jesus had made special efforts to provide against the sinking of this hour. He warned his friends of it beforehand. He admitted four of his chosen disciples upon the Mount of Transfiguration to look into the heavenly world and see him in glory and hear him speaking with Moses and Elijah of his coming death. All this was given that their faith might not fail. Then, just before his death, at the grave of Lazarus, he declared himself the Resurrection and the Life, and showed them in the restored form of a well-known friend what he meant by rising from the dead--for it is said, "They questioned among themselves what the rising from the dead should mean."

But all appeared to be gone now. Love still kept watch. Spices were prepared to embalm the precious form with no hope, apparently, of its resurrection. It had faded out from their minds as it seems to fade out of the minds of us Christians when we bewail our dead and speak of them as "lost." Their Jesus was to them dead and gone; and why this thing was permitted was a dark, insoluble mystery. "We trusted that it had been he that should have redeemed Israel," said the two disciples, sadly walking on the way to Emmaus. "We trusted!" All in the past tense. Not a word of any hope or faith in the resurrection! And yet their Lord and Master was even at that moment walking with them and comforting their hearts.

Surely, in this respect, we modern Christians too often tread in the footsteps of the saints and suffer as they did. But our Lord knows our weakness; he knows the physical faintness which comes from long watching, the obscuration of mind which comes from sorrow, and he is at hand to comfort us in our blind weeping. Mary Magdalene knew him not, because her eyes were full of tears, till his well-known voice called her name. The mourning disciples as they walked to Emmaus knew not that Jesus was walking by them. And so, ever since, to weary hearts and lonely homes the comforting Christ still comes invisibly, with sweetness and rest, if only we of little faith would remember his promises and recognize his presence. Still now, as he first announced himself, he comes "to heal the broken-hearted," and is beside them ever in the darkest and most dreadful hour of their afflictions.

XXIX

THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS

_Easter Sunday_

There is something wonderfully poetic in the simple history given by the different Evangelists of the resurrection of our Lord. It is like a calm, serene, dewy morning, after a night of thunder and tempest. One of the most beautiful features in the narrative is the presence of those godlike forms of our angel brethren. How can it be possible that critics with human hearts have torn and mangled this sacred picture for the purpose of effacing these celestial forms--so beautiful, so glorious! Is it superstition to believe that there are higher forms of life, intellect, and energy than those of earth; that there are races of superior beings between us and the throne of God, as there are gradations below us of less and lessening power down to the half-vegetable zoöphytes? These angels, with their power, their purity, their unfading youth, their tender sympathy for man, are a radiant celestial possibility which every heart must long to claim as not only probable but certain.

The history of our Lord from first to last is fragrant with the sympathy and musical with the presence of these shining ones. They announced his coming to the Blessed among Women. They filled the air with songs and rejoicings at the hour of his birth. They ministered to him during his temptations in the wilderness. When repentant sinners thronged about him and Scribes and Pharisees sneered, it was to the sympathy of these invisible ones that he turned, as those whose hearts thrilled with joy over the repenting sinner. In the last mysterious agony at Gethsemane it was an angel that appeared and strengthened him. And now with what godlike energy do they hasten upon their mission to attend their king's awaking!

"And, behold, there was a great earthquake, for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and rolled back the stone from the door of the sepulchre, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment was white as snow, and for fear of him the keepers did shake and became as dead men."

In another Evangelist we have a scene that preceded this. These devoted women, in whose hearts love outlived both faith and hope, rose while it was yet dark, and set out with their spices and perfumes to go and pay their last tribute of affection and reverence to the dead.

They were under fear of persecution and death; they knew the grave was sealed and watched by those who had slain their Lord, but still they determined to go. There was the inconsiderate hardihood of love in their undertaking, and the artless helplessness of their inquiry, "Who will roll away the stone from the door?" shows the desperation of their enterprise. Yet they could not but believe that by prayers or tears or offered payment--in some way--that stone should be rolled away.

Arrived on the spot, they saw that the sepulchre was open and empty, and Mary Magdalene, with the impulsive haste and earnestness which marks her character, ran back to the house of John, where were the mother of Jesus, and Peter, and astonished them with the tidings. "They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him."

Nothing is said of the Mother in this scene. Probably she was utterly worn out and exhausted by the dreadful scenes of the day before, and incapable of further exertion. But Peter and John started immediately for the sepulchre. Meanwhile, the two other women went into the sepulchre and stood there perplexed, till suddenly they saw a vision of celestial forms, radiant in immortal youth and clothed in white. One said:--

"Be not afraid. I know ye seek Jesus of Nazareth that was crucified. Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen as he said. Behold where they laid him. Remember how he spake unto you of this when he was in Galilee, saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and the third day rise again."

And they remembered his words.

Furthermore, the friendly spirit bids them to go and tell the disciples and Peter that their Master is risen from the dead, and is going before them into Galilee--there shall they see him. And charged with this message the women had fled from the sepulchre just as Peter and John came up.

The delicacies of character are strikingly shown in the brief record. John outruns Peter, stoops down and looks into the sepulchre; but that species of reticence which always appears in him controls him here--he hesitates to enter the sacred place. Now, however, comes Peter, impetuous, ardent, determined, and passes right into the tomb.

There is a touch of homelike minuteness in the description of the grave as they found it--no discovery of haste, no sign of confusion, but all in order: the linen grave-clothes lying in one place; the napkin that was about his head not lying with them, but folded together in a place by itself; indicating the perfect calmness and composure with which their Lord had risen--transported with no rapture or surprise, but, in this supreme moment, maintaining the same tranquillity which had ever characterized him.

It is said they saw and believed, though as yet they did not fully understand the saying that he must rise from the dead; and they left the place and ran with the news to the disciples.

But Mary still lingers weeping by the empty tomb--type of too many of us, who forget that our beloved ones have arisen. Through her tears she sees the pitying angels, who ask her as they might often ask us, "Why weepest thou?" She tells her sorrowful story--they have taken away her Lord and she knows not where they have laid him; and yet at this moment Jesus is standing by her, and one word from his voice changes all.

It is not general truth or general belief that our souls need in their anguish; it is one word from Christ to us, it is his voice calling us by name, that makes the darkness light.

We mark throughout this story the sympathetic touches of interest in the angels. They had heard and remembered what Christ said in Galilee, though his people had forgotten it. They had had sympathy for the repentant weeping of Peter, and sent a special message of comfort to him. These elder brethren of the household seem in all things most thoughtful and careful of human feelings; they breathe around us the spirit of that world where an unloving word or harsh judgment is an impossible conception.

The earlier Christian tradition speaks of our Lord's first visit to his mother. It may be that in that space of time while Peter and John were running to the sepulchre Jesus himself chose to draw near to his mother. To her he gave one of his last dying words, and we cannot but believe that one of his earliest risen messages of hope and blessing was for her. But over an interview so peculiar and so blessed the sacred narrative has deemed it wise to leave the veil of silence.

The time after our Lord's resurrection is one full of mysteries. But few things are told us of that life which he lived on earth. He no longer walked the ways of men as before--no longer lived with his disciples, but only appeared to them from time to time, as he saw that they needed comfort, counsel, or rebuke. We have the beautiful story of the walk to Emmaus. We have accounts of meetings of the disciples with closed doors, for fear of the Jews, when Jesus suddenly appeared in the midst of them, saying, "Peace be unto you!" and showing to them his hands and his side; and it is added, "Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord."

We have an account of how he suddenly appeared to them by the Lake of Genesareth, when they had been vainly toiling all night--how he stood on the shore in the dim gray of morning and said, "Children, have ye any meat?" They answered him "No;" and he said, "Cast the net on the right hand and ye shall find." And then John whispers to Peter, "It is the Lord!" and Peter, impetuous to the last, casts himself into the water and swims to the shore. They find a fire prepared, a meal ready for them, and Jesus to bless the bread,--and very sweet and lovely was the interview.

How many such visits and interviews there were--when and with whom--we have no means of knowing, though St. John indicates that there were many other things which Jesus said and did worthy of record besides those of which we are told. We learn from St. Paul that he appeared to more than five hundred of his followers at once--a meeting not described by any of the Evangelists.

It is believed by many Christians that Christ is yet coming to reign visibly upon this earth. That Christ should reign in any one spot or city of this earth, as earthly kings reign, with a court and human forms of administration, is suggestive of grave difficulties. The embarrassments in the way of our Centennial Exhibition this year, the fatigue and disturbance and danger to health and life of such crowds coming and going, might suggest what would be the effect on human society if in any one earthly place the universal object of all human desire were located. But it may be possible that the barrier between the spiritual world and ours will be so far removed that the presence of our Lord and his saints may at times be with us, even as Christ was with the disciples in this interval. It may become a lawful subject of desire and prayer and expectation. It may be in that day that in assemblies of his people Jesus will suddenly stand, saying, "Peace be unto you!" Such appearances could take place in all countries and lands, according to human needs, without deranging human society.

But whether visibly or by the manifestation of his Spirit, let us hasten and look forward to that final second coming of our Master, when the kingdoms of this world shall be the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ.

XXX

THE ASCENSION OF OUR LORD

_Ascension Day_

At length the visible and mortal pilgrimage of our Lord was over, and the time come when he must return to his home in heaven, to the glory with the Father which he had before the world was.

We cannot fail to notice the calmness, brevity, and simplicity with which this crowning act of his life is recorded. He had before told his disciples that it was better for them that his visible presence should be withdrawn from them, and that when ascended to the Father he should be with them as an intimate spiritual presence and power. He now speaks to them of a baptism of the Holy Spirit that they should receive after his ascension, and bids them tarry in Jerusalem till they be endued with this power from on high.

Then the narrative says: "And he led them out as far as Bethany; and he lifted up his hands and blessed them, and while he blessed them he was parted from them and taken up into heaven; and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they were looking steadfastly to heaven, as he went up, behold two men stood by them in white apparel, who said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus which is taken from you into heaven shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy from the Mount of Olives, and were continually in the temple praising and blessing God."

The forty days that Jesus lingered on earth had, it seems, not been in vain. His mourning flock were consoled and brought to such a point of implicit faith that the final separation was full of joy.

They were at last convinced that it was better for them that he go to the Father--that an ascended Lord, seated at the right hand of power and shedding down spiritual light and joy, was better than any earthly presence, however dear. Christ, as a living power of inspiration in the soul, was henceforth to be nearer, dearer, more inseparable, more consoling and helpful than the man of Nazareth had ever been.

Let us all with one heart unite in the beautiful prayer of the church for this day: "O God, the King of Glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy Kingdom in Heaven, we beseech thee leave us not comfortless; but send to us thy Holy Ghost to comfort and exalt us to that same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before us, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen."

XXXI

THE HOLY SPIRIT

_Whitsuntide_

When our Saviour was to go forth on his great mission he spent forty days in prayer; and so now his little church were to spend forty days of waiting and devotion till they should receive the gift from on high. What that gift was we can see in their history. How dark, how confused, how unspiritual their views, how low their faith, how easily upset by the storms of persecution! But when the divine influence came upon them, what a change! What clearness, what insight, what courage, what power! When brought before kings and rulers they bore joyous testimony; when beaten ignominiously they went out rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his sake.

Do not all ministers of Christ, all Christians to whose keeping his honor and cause is confided, need such a baptism as this, such a new birth in spiritual things? For the gift came not merely on the twelve Apostles, but on the whole company of believers, both men and women. We read the names of the twelve, and then are told that "these all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brethren,"--a company of a hundred and twenty persons.

They were united day after day in prayer--their whole souls, with one accord, were lifted heavenward; all earthly scenes and interests were put aside, and the attitude of their minds was one of ardent desire and expectancy.

It was to souls so raised, so enkindled, that at last the glorious gift came--the spiritual power that made every Christian man and woman among them an inspired and convincing witness for Christ. The world witnessed that day a new sight--an invisible spiritual power, before which thousands bowed at the name of that Jesus whom but a few weeks before they had seen crucified. And why have we not such a baptism and such a power? Is our faith what it should be,--our zeal, our devotion? If all Christians were like us, would the world ever be converted to God? Is there a gift of spiritual power and constancy of faith to be had in answer to fervent prayer? and should we not seek it as they did? Of late there have been in Europe and in this country large conventions of Christians of all names and denominations to pray and seek for this gift of the Holy Spirit, to enable them to witness for Christ as these witnessed; it is a most joyful sign of our times. Let us hope that such prayers may be answered in bringing back to the modern church something of the fervor, the simplicity, the entire devotion that characterized these first Christians. It is not by arguing with skeptics, but by a divine and holy life, that Christians are to convince the world of the truth of our religion. It is "Christ in us, the hope of glory," that is to be the power that shall convert the world.

XXXII

CHRIST'S SECOND LIFE, IN HIS FOLLOWERS

In a moment of profound emotion, when our Lord contemplated the near approach of the last tragedy in his life, he said: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit."

Accordingly, it was but little more than a month after the scenes of Calvary before Jerusalem was filled with a harvest of men and women who were born into the Christ-life, and were living and acting in his spirit.

At the feast of Pentecost Jerusalem was full of strangers, devout Jews from every nation under heaven, and three thousand in one day bowed at the feet of the Jesus whom they had crucified. The chief priests were enraged and terrified, for everywhere the Apostles of this crucified Jesus, inspired with a supernatural courage, were working miracles and preaching with an energy even more overcoming than that of the Master. Jesus had been among them but as one man; he had come back as twelve men, every one of whom was full of him, working his works and preaching him with overwhelming power.

It is most impressive to read in the Book of Acts how Peter and John were called before Annas and Caiaphas--the very tribunal before which Jesus so lately stood, the tribunal before which Peter denied him and John stood in trembling silence. Now these same men face high priests and elders with heads erect and flashing eyes, and say:--

"If we be this day examined of the good deed done to the impotent man, be it known unto you that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified and whom God raised from the dead, doth this man stand before you whole. This is the stone which was set at naught of you builders, which has become the head of the corner; neither is there salvation in any other."

We can imagine the dismay of the Sanhedrim when such men and such sermons met them at every corner. The record says that, perceiving the boldness of Peter and John, and knowing that they were unlearned men, they marveled, and took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus!

It is not likely that the high priest had forgotten the recent time when Jesus stood bound before him. Evidently even then his manner had inspired a secret misgiving awe; and here were these disciples now looking and speaking just like him, with the same certainty, the same majesty. It was Jesus of Nazareth returning in his followers. It was a terror to them all. But we are told the word of God grew and prevailed, the converts increased in crowds daily, "a great company of the priests were obedient" to the word. Of course persecution raged. To confess Christ was to lose place, patronage, and daily bread. The Christians, in their new joy, met this by throwing all their worldly possessions into a common stock and apportioning support to each.

There were rich men like Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and many others, and we read of men who sold all they had and laid the money at the Apostles' feet. Thus those who daily were thrown out of employment for Christ's sake were supported and relieved. A great financial and administrative business grew up out of this state of things, and we are told that there arose a murmuring among the foreign-born Jews that their widows were neglected in the apportionment of aid.

The Jews have been in all ages a trading nation. Palestine was a little country situated in the very heart of the ancient civilized world. It was a centre of emigration. Colonies of Jews, bearing their religion, their synagogue, their national zeal, had foothold and maintained Jewish worship in almost every leading city of Greece and Rome. They were called, according to their country, Greeks or Romans, while as to religion and race they were Jews.

It appears that the proportion of Greek-born Jews among the converts was so great as to warrant the appointment of seven deacons, all of whom bear names which show their Grecian origin. Stephen was evidently a noted man among them. He is described as full of faith and the Holy Ghost. For aught we know, Stephen may have been one of those Greeks who, during the last week of Christ's life in Jerusalem, came to his disciples, saying, "Sir, we would see Jesus." He may have been among the first-fruits of that harvest which Christ then foresaw when he said, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." He seems to have been of a nature peculiarly receptive and lovely--a beautiful medium through whom the Christ-spirit could reveal itself. If he had been in Jerusalem at the time of Christ's death, and witnessed the scenes of Calvary, we may well believe what a fervor was enkindled in his soul, and with what zeal he devoted himself to him. His activity was not confined to the temporal ministrations which were committed to him. He is described as "full of faith and power, and doing great miracles." He maintained the cause of Jesus in word as well as deed. Certain leaders in a Jewish synagogue, of Greek extraction like himself, who still clung to Jewish prejudices, disputed with him, and we are told they were not able to resist the wisdom and power with which he spoke. A tumult was stirred up, and Stephen was brought before the Sanhedrim, and stood in the place where his Master had stood before him. Again, as before, it was the Jewish national pride and bitterness that were arrayed against him. Stephen had shown the glories of that new spiritual kingdom which Christ was bringing in, where there should be neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ should be all in all. So the accusation was formulated against him:--

"We have heard him say that Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place and shall change the customs which Moses delivered unto us."

The High Priest probably felt that now he had got a leading Christian at advantage. He would meet now and expose this sect that threatened to overthrow their country and destroy their venerable religion. He said to Stephen, with a semblance of moderation and justice, "Are these things so?"

There was a pause, in which Stephen seems to have been so filled by the vision of the glory and beauty of the new life which was opening before the world, that he could not speak. It is said:--

"And all that sat in the council, looking steadfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel."

Then began that noble speech, evidently the speech of a Greek-born Jew, who had studied the Hebrew history from a different standpoint from the Rabbins. It is clear from the fragment of this address that it was designed to show, even by their past history, that God's dealings with his people had been irrespective of the temple of Jerusalem and the worship there. He dwelt on God's calling of Abraham, his sojourn in Canaan before he possessed it; of God's suffering the chosen race to sojourn in Egypt; of Moses, born and nurtured in a Gentile court, and educated in the wisdom of the Egyptians. This man, who lived to the age of forty years as an Egyptian prince, begins to offer himself as a guide and teacher to his oppressed people, but they reject his mission with scorn. Then comes the scene of the appearance of Jehovah for their rescue and the appointment of Moses to accomplish their deliverance, and he drives home the parallel between Moses and the rejected Jesus.

This Moses, whom they refused, saying, "Who made thee a ruler and a judge?" the same did God send to be a ruler and a deliverer. "This is that Moses who said, A Prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you like unto me: him shall ye hear." He then shows how the Jewish nation disobeyed Moses and God, and turned back to the golden calf of Egypt. He traces their history till the time of the building of the temple, but adds that "the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands, as saith the prophet: Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord. Hath not my hand made all these things?" We may imagine the fervor, the energy of this brief history, the tone, the spirit, the flashing eye that gave point to every incident. It was perfectly evident what he was coming to, what use he was going to make of this recital--that the Jews were not God's favorites _per se_; that they were and always had been an ungrateful, rebellious people; that God had chosen them, in spite of their sins, to be the unworthy guardians and receivers of a great mission for the whole world; that the temple was not a necessity, that it came late in their history, and that God himself had declared his superiority to it. It was easy to see that he was coming round to the mission of Jesus, the prophet whom Moses had predicted, and whom they had rejected as they did Moses. But there was evidently a tumult rising, and Stephen saw that he was about to be interrupted, and therefore, suddenly, leaving the narrative unfinished, he breaks forth:--

"Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost--as your fathers did so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? They slew them which prophesied the coming of that Just One of whom ye have been the betrayers and murderers; who have received the law by the dispensation of angels and have not kept it."

These words were as coals dropping upon naphtha. They were cut to the heart; they gnashed on him with their teeth; they raved round him as wild beasts who collect themselves for a deadly spring.

"But he, full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God."

There was something in his rapt appearance, his pale, upturned face and eager eyes, that caused a moment's silence.

In a voice of exultation and awe he said:--

"Behold! I see the heavens opened and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God."

The Son of man!--the very words that Christ had used when he stood before Caiaphas about fifty days before, when he said, "Hereafter ye shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven!"

There was a frantic shriek of rage. The court broke up and became a blind, infuriate mob. All consideration was forgotten in the blind passion of the hour. Though they had no legal right to take life without a Roman sentence, they determined to have the blood of this man, cost what it might.

They hurried him out of the city with curses and execrations. The executioners stripped off their outer garments to prepare for the butchery, and laid them down at the feet of a young zealot named Saul of Tarsus.

There are many paintings of this scene in the galleries of Europe. We may imagine him, pale and enraptured, looking up into the face of that Jesus whom he saw in glory, and as they threw him violently down he cried, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." Rising to his knees, wounded and bleeding, he added, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." And then, says the narrative, "He fell asleep."

The sweetness and tenderness of this expression shows more than anything else how completely the faith of Christ had conquered death. Christians spoke of death simply as a sleep. And here amid the hootings and revilings of a mob, the crash of stones and insult and execration, nothing could hinder Christ's beloved from falling asleep. At peace within, with a heaven of love in his soul, he pitied and prayed for the wretched creatures who were murdering him, and passed to the right hand of Jesus--the first who had sealed his testimony with his blood.

Thus was sown again the first perfected seed of the new wheat which rose from the grave of Christ! Jesus was the first whom the world ever saw praying with his dying breath for his murderers; and Stephen, who had risen to the same majesty of denunciation and rebuke of sin which characterized his master, was baptized into the same tenderness of prayer for the miserable mob who were howling like wild beasts around him. Heavenly love never shrinks from denouncing sin; but it has a prayer for the sinner ever in its breast, and the nearer it comes to the higher world the more it pities this lower one.

But though the orator was crushed the cause was not lost.

Jesus, standing at the right hand of God, had only to reach forth and touch that Saul of Tarsus who stood consenting to his death, and he fell down at his feet trembling, crying, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?"

The noble work which Stephen had begun, the message of universal love to Jew and Gentile, passed from the hands of dying Stephen to the living Paul, who from that hour spoke the sentiment that must be the animating spirit of every true lover and follower of the Master's footsteps: "I am crucified with Christ; and now it is no more I that live, but Christ that liveth in me."

EARTHLY CARE A HEAVENLY DISCIPLINE

"Why should these cares my heart divide, If Thou, indeed, hast set me free? Why am I thus, if Thou hast died-- If Thou hast died to ransom me?"

Nothing is more frequently felt and spoken of, as a hindrance to the inward life of devotion, than the "cares of life;" and even upon the showing of our Lord himself, the cares of the world are the thorns that choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful.

And yet, if this is a necessary and inevitable result of worldly care, why does the providence of God so order things that it forms so large and unavoidable a part of every human experience? Why is the physical system of man arranged with such daily, oft-recurring wants? Why does his nature, in its full development, tend to that state of society in which wants multiply, and the business of supply becomes more complicated, and requiring constantly more thought and attention, and bringing the outward and seen into a state of constant friction and pressure on the inner and spiritual?

Has God arranged an outward system to be a constant diversion from the inward--a weight on its wheels--a burden on its wings--and then commanded a strict and rigid inwardness and spirituality? Why placed us where the things that are seen and temporal must unavoidably have so much of our thoughts, and time, and care, yet said to us, "Set your affections on things above, and not on things on the earth. Love not the world, neither the things of the world"? And why does one of our brightest examples of Christian experience, as it should be, say, "While we look not on the things which are seen, but on the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal"?

The Bible tells us that our whole existence here is a disciplinary one; that this whole physical system, by which our spirit is inclosed with all the joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, and wants which form a part of it, are designed as an education to fit the soul for its immortality; and as worldly care forms the greater part of the staple of every human life, there must be some mode of viewing and meeting it, which converts it from an enemy of spirituality into a means of grace and spiritual advancement.

Why, then, do we so often hear the lamentation, "It seems to me as if I could advance to the higher stages of Christian life, if it were not for the pressure of my business and the multitude of my worldly cares"? Is it not God, O Christian, who, in ordering thy lot, has laid these cares upon thee, and who still holds them about thee, and permits no escape from them? And as his great, undivided object is thy spiritual improvement, is there not some misapprehension or wrong use of these cares, if they do not tend to advance it? Is it not even as if a scholar should say, I could advance in science were it not for all the time and care which lessons, and books, and lectures require?

How, then, shall earthly care become heavenly discipline? How shall the disposition of the weight be altered so as to press the spirit upward towards God, instead of downward and away? How shall the pillar of cloud which rises between us and him become one of fire, to reflect upon us constantly the light of his countenance, and to guide us over the sands of life's desert?

It appears to us that the great radical difficulty is an intellectual one, and lies in a wrong belief. There is not a genuine and real belief of the presence and agency of God in the minor events and details of life, which is necessary to change them from secular cares into spiritual blessings.

It is true there is much loose talk about an overruling Providence; and yet, if fairly stated, the belief of a great many Christians might be thus expressed: God has organized and set in operation certain general laws of matter and mind, which work out the particular results of life, and over these laws he exercises a general supervision and care, so that all the great affairs of the world are carried on after the counsel of his own will; and in a certain general sense, all things are working together for good to those that love God. But when some simple-minded, childlike Christian really proceeds to refer all the smaller events of life to God's immediate care and agency, there is a smile of incredulity, and it is thought that the good brother displays more Christian feeling than sound philosophy.

But as life for every individual is made up of fractions and minute atoms--as those things which go to affect habits and character are small and hourly recurring, it comes to pass that a belief in Providence so very wide and general is altogether inefficient for consecrating and rendering sacred the great body of what comes in contact with the mind in the experience of life. Only once in years does the Christian with this kind of belief hear the voice of the Lord God speaking to him. When the hand of death is laid on his child, or the bolt strikes down the brother by his side, then, indeed, he feels that God is drawing near; he listens humbly for the inward voice that shall explain the meaning and need of this discipline. When by some unforeseen occurrence the whole of his earthly property is swept away,--he becomes a poor man,--this event, in his eyes, assumes sufficient magnitude to have come from God, and to have a design and meaning; but when smaller comforts are removed, smaller losses are encountered, and the petty every-day vexations and annoyances of life press about him, he recognizes no God, and hears no voice, and sees no design. Hence John Newton says, "Many Christians, who bear the loss of a child, or the destruction of all their property, with the most heroic Christian fortitude, are entirely vanquished and overcome by the breaking of a dish, or the blunders of a servant, and show so unchristian a spirit, that we cannot but wonder at them."

So when the breath of slander, or the pressure of human injustice, comes so heavily on a man as really to threaten loss of character, and destruction of his temporal interests, he seems forced to recognize the hand and voice of God, through the veil of human agencies, and in time-honored words to say:--

"When men of spite against me join, They are the sword; the hand is thine."

But the smaller injustice and fault-finding which meet every one more or less in the daily intercourse of life, the overheard remark, the implied censure, too petty, perhaps, to be even spoken of, these daily recurring sources of disquietude and unhappiness are not referred to God's providence, nor considered as a part of his probation and discipline. Those thousand vexations which come upon us through the unreasonableness, the carelessness, the various constitutional failings, or ill adaptedness of others to our peculiarities of character, form a very large item of the disquietudes of life; and yet how very few look beyond the human agent, and feel these are trials coming from God! Yet it is true, in many cases, that these so-called minor vexations form the greater part, and in many cases the only discipline of life; and to those that do not view them as ordered individually by God, and coming upon them by specified design, "their affliction 'really' cometh of the dust, and their trouble springs out of the ground;" it is sanctified and relieved by no divine presence and aid, but borne alone and in a mere human spirit, and by mere human reliances; it acts on the mind as a constant diversion and hindrance, instead of a moral discipline.

Hence, too, come a coldness, and generality, and wandering of mind in prayer: the things that are on the heart, that are distracting the mind, that have filled the soul so full that there is no room for anything else, are all considered too small and undignified to come within the pale of a prayer and so, with a wandering mind and a distracted heart, the Christian offers up his prayer for things which he thinks he ought to want, and makes no mention of those which he does. He prays that God would pour out his spirit on the heathen, and convert the world, and build up his kingdom everywhere, when perhaps a whole set of little anxieties, and wants, and vexations are so distracting his thoughts, that he hardly knows what he has been saying: a faithless servant is wasting his property; a careless or blundering workman has spoiled a lot of goods; a child is vexatious or unruly; a friend has made promises and failed to keep them; an acquaintance has made unjust or satirical remarks; some new furniture has been damaged or ruined by carelessness in the household; but all this trouble forms no subject matter for prayer, though there it is, all the while lying like lead on the heart, and keeping it down, so that it has no power to expand and take in anything else. But were God known and regarded as the soul's familiar friend, were every trouble of the heart as it rises breathed into his bosom, were it felt that there is not one of the smallest of life's troubles that has not been permitted by him, and permitted for specific good purpose to the soul, how much more would these be in prayer! how constant, how daily might it become! how it might settle and clear the atmosphere of the soul! how it might so dispose and lay away many anxieties which now take up their place there, that there might be room for the higher themes and considerations of religion!

Many sensitive and fastidious natures are worn away by the constant friction of what are called little troubles. Without any great affliction, they feel that all the flower and sweetness of their life have faded; their eye grows dim, their cheek care-worn, and their spirit loses hope and elasticity, and becomes bowed with premature age; and in the midst of tangible and physical comfort, they are restless and unhappy. The constant undercurrent of little cares and vexations, which is slowly wearing on the finer springs of life, is seen by no one; scarce ever do they speak of these things to their nearest friends. Yet were there a friend of a spirit so discerning as to feel and sympathize in all these things, how much of this repressed electric restlessness would pass off through such a sympathizing mind.

Yet among human friends this is all but impossible, for minds are so diverse that what is a trial and a care to one is a matter of sport and amusement to another; and all the inner world breathed into a human ear only excites a surprised or contemptuous pity. Whom, then, shall the soul turn to? Who will feel that to be affliction which each spirit feels to be so? If the soul shut itself within itself, it becomes morbid; the fine chords of the mind and nerves by constant wear become jarring and discordant; hence fretfulness, discontent, and habitual irritability steal over the sincere Christian.

But to the Christian that really believes in the agency of God in the smallest events of life, that confides in his love, and makes his sympathy his refuge, the thousand minute cares and perplexities of life become each one a fine affiliating bond between the soul and its God. God is known, not by abstract definition, and by high-raised conceptions of the soul's aspiring hours, but known as a man knoweth his friend; he is known by the hourly wants he supplies; known by every care with which he momentarily sympathizes, every apprehension which he relieves, every temptation which he enables us to surmount. We learn to know God as the infant child learns to know its mother and its father, by all the helplessness and all the dependence which are incident to this commencement of our moral existence; and as we go on thus year by year, and find in every changing situation, in every reverse, in every trouble, from the lightest sorrow to those which wring our soul from its depths, that he is equally present, and that his gracious aid is equally adequate, our faith seems gradually almost to change to sight; and God's existence, his love and care, seem to us more real than any other source of reliance, and multiplied cares and trials are only new avenues of acquaintance between us and heaven.

Suppose, in some bright vision unfolding to our view, in tranquil evening or solemn midnight, the glorified form of some departed friend should appear to us with the announcement, "This year is to be to you one of especial probation and discipline, with reference to perfecting you for a heavenly state. Weigh well and consider every incident of your daily life, for not one shall fall out by accident, but each one is to be a finished and indispensable link in a bright chain that is to draw you upward to the skies!"

With what new eyes should we now look on our daily lot! and if we found in it not a single change,--the same old cares, the same perplexities, the same uninteresting drudgeries still,--with what new meaning would every incident be invested! and with what other and sublimer spirit could we meet them? Yet, if announced by one rising from the dead with the visible glory of a spiritual world, this truth could be asserted no more clearly and distinctly than Jesus Christ has stated it already. Not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Father. Not one of them is forgotten by him; and we are of more value than many sparrows; yea, even the hairs of our head are all numbered. Not till belief in these declarations, in their most literal sense, becomes the calm and settled habit of the soul, is life ever redeemed from drudgery and dreary emptiness, and made full of interest, meaning, and divine significance. Not till then do its groveling wants, its wearing cares, its stinging vexations, become to us ministering spirits, each one, by a silent but certain agency, fitting us for a higher and perfect sphere.

THE MINISTRATION OF OUR DEPARTED FRIENDS

A NEW YEAR'S REVERIE

"It is a beautiful belief, That ever round our head Are hovering on viewless wings The spirits of the dead."

While every year is taking one and another from the ranks of life and usefulness, or the charmed circle of friendship and love, it is soothing to remember that the spiritual world is gaining in riches through the poverty of this.

In early life, with our friends all around us,--hearing their voices, cheered by their smiles,--death and the spiritual world are to us remote, misty, and half fabulous; but as we advance in our journey, and voice after voice is hushed, and form after form vanishes from our side, and our shadow falls almost solitary on the hillside of life, the soul, by a necessity of its being, tends to the unseen and spiritual, and pursues in another life those it seeks in vain in this.

For with every friend that dies, dies also some especial form of social enjoyment, whose being depended on the peculiar character of that friend; till, late in the afternoon of life, the pilgrim seems to himself to have passed over to the unseen world in successive portions half his own spirit; and poor indeed is he who has not familiarized himself with that unknown, whither, despite himself, his soul is earnestly tending.

One of the deepest and most imperative cravings of the human heart, as it follows its beloved ones beyond the veil, is for some assurance that they still love and care for us. Could we firmly believe this, bereavement would lose half its bitterness. As a German writer beautifully expresses it, "Our friend is not wholly gone from us; we see across the river of death, in the blue distance, the smoke of his cottage;" hence the heart, always creating what it desires, has ever made the guardianship and ministration of departed spirits a favorite theme of poetic fiction.

But is it, then, fiction? Does revelation, which gives so many hopes which nature had not, give none here? Is there no sober certainty to correspond to the inborn and passionate craving of the soul? Do departed spirits in verity retain any knowledge of what transpires in this world, and take any part in its scenes? All that revelation says of a spiritual state is more intimation than assertion; it has no distinct treatise, and teaches nothing apparently of set purpose; but gives vague, glorious images, while now and then some accidental ray of intelligence looks out,--

"like eyes of cherubs shining From out the veil that hid the ark."

But out of all the different hints and assertions of the Bible we think a better inferential argument might be constructed to prove the ministration of departed spirits than for many a doctrine which has passed in its day for the height of orthodoxy.

First, then, the Bible distinctly says that there is a class of invisible spirits who minister to the children of men: "Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister to those who shall be heirs of salvation?" It is said of little children, that "their angels do always behold the face of our Father which is in heaven." This last passage, from the words of our Saviour, taken in connection with the well-known tradition of his time, fully recognizes the idea of individual guardian spirits; for God's government over mind is, it seems, throughout, one of intermediate agencies, and these not chosen at random, but with the nicest reference to their adaptation to the purpose intended. Not even the All-seeing, All-knowing One was deemed perfectly adapted to become a human Saviour without a human experience. Knowledge intuitive, gained from above, of human wants and woes was not enough--to it must be added the home-born certainty of consciousness and memory; the Head of all mediation must become human. Is it likely, then, that, in selecting subordinate agencies, this so necessary a requisite of a human life and experience is overlooked? While around the throne of God stand spirits, now sainted and glorified, yet thrillingly conscious of a past experience of sin and sorrow, and trembling in sympathy with temptations and struggles like their own, is it likely that he would pass by these souls, thus burning for the work, and commit it to those bright abstract beings whose knowledge and experience are comparatively so distant and so cold?

It is strongly in confirmation of this idea, that in the transfiguration scene--which seems to have been intended purposely to give the disciples a glimpse of the glorified state of their Master--we find him attended by two spirits of earth, Moses and Elias, "which appeared with him in glory, and spake of his death which he should accomplish at Jerusalem." It appears that these so long departed ones were still mingling in deep sympathy with the tide of human affairs--not only aware of the present, but also informed as to the future. In coincidence with this idea are all those passages which speak of the redeemed of earth as being closely and indissolubly identified with Christ, members of his body, of his flesh and his bones. It is not to be supposed that those united to Jesus above all others by so vivid a sympathy and community of interests are left out as instruments in that great work of human regeneration which so engrosses him; and when we hear Christians spoken of as kings and priests unto God, as those who shall judge angels, we see it more than intimated that they are to be the partners and actors in that great work of spiritual regeneration of which Jesus is the head.

What then? May we look among the band of ministering spirits for our own departed ones? Whom would God be more likely to send us? Have we in heaven a friend who knew us to the heart's core? a friend to whom we have unfolded our soul in its most secret recesses? to whom we have confessed our weaknesses and deplored our griefs? If we are to have a ministering spirit, who better adapted? Have we not memories which correspond to such a belief? When our soul has been cast down, has never an invisible voice whispered, "There is lifting up"? Have not gales and breezes of sweet and healing thought been wafted over us, as if an angel had shaken from his wings the odors of paradise? Many a one, we are confident, can remember such things--and whence come they? Why do the children of the pious mother, whose grave has grown green and smooth with years, seem often to walk through perils and dangers fearful and imminent as the crossing Mohammed's fiery gulf on the edge of a drawn sword, yet walk unhurt? Ah! could we see that attendant form, that face where the angel conceals not the mother, our question would be answered.

It may be possible that a friend is sometimes taken because the divine One sees that his ministry can act more powerfully from the unseen world than amid the infirmities of mortal intercourse. Here the soul, distracted and hemmed in by human events and by bodily infirmities, often scarce knows itself, and makes no impression on others correspondent to its desires. The mother would fain electrify the heart of her child; she yearns and burns in vain to make her soul effective on its soul, and to inspire it with a spiritual and holy life; but all her own weaknesses, faults, and mortal cares cramp and confine her, till death breaks all fetters; and then, first truly alive, risen, purified, and at rest, she may do calmly, sweetly, and certainly, what, amid the tempests and tossings of life, she labored for painfully and fitfully. So, also, to generous souls, who burn for the good of man, who deplore the shortness of life, and the little that is permitted to any individual agency on earth, does this belief open a heavenly field. Think not, father or brother, long laboring for man, till thy sun stands on the western mountains,--think not that thy day in this world is over. Perhaps, like Jesus, thou hast lived a human life, and gained a human experience, to become, under and like him, a saviour of thousands; thou hast been through the preparation, but thy real work of good, thy full power of doing, is yet to begin.

But again: there are some spirits (and those of earth's choicest) to whom, so far as enjoyment to themselves or others is concerned, this life seems to have been a total failure. A hard hand from the first, and all the way through life, seems to have been laid upon them; they seem to live only to be chastened and crushed, and we lay them in the grave at last in mournful silence. To such, what a vision is opened by this belief! This hard discipline has been the school and task-work by which their soul has been fitted for their invisible labors in a future life; and when they pass the gates of the grave, their course of benevolent acting first begins, and they find themselves delighted possessors of what through many years they have sighed for--the power of doing good. The year just past, like all other years, has taken from a thousand circles the sainted, the just, and the beloved; there are spots in a thousand graveyards which have become this year dearer than all the living world; but in the loneliness of sorrow how cheering to think that our lost ones are not wholly gone from us! They still may move about in our homes, shedding around an atmosphere of purity and peace, promptings of good, and reproofs of evil. We are compassed about by a cloud of witnesses, whose hearts throb in sympathy with every effort and struggle, and who thrill with joy at every success. How should this thought check and rebuke every worldly feeling and unworthy purpose, and enshrine us, in the midst of a forgetful and unspiritual world, with an atmosphere of heavenly peace. They have overcome--have risen--are crowned, glorified, but still they remain to us, our assistants, our comforters, and in every hour of darkness their voice speaks to us: "So we grieved, so we struggled, so we fainted, so we doubted; but we have overcome, we have obtained, we have seen, we have found--and in our victory behold the certainty of thy own."

RELIGIOUS SKETCHES

CHILDREN

"A little child shall lead them."

One cold market morning I looked into a milliner's shop, and there I saw a hale, hearty, well-browned young fellow from the country, with his long cart whip, and lion-shag coat, holding up some little matter, and turning it about on his great fist. And what do you suppose it was? _A baby's bonnet!_ A little, soft, blue satin hood, with a swan's-down border, white as the new-fallen snow, with a frill of rich blonde around the edge.

By his side stood a very pretty woman, holding, with no small pride, the baby--for evidently it was _the_ baby. Any one could read that fact in every glance, as they looked at each other, and then at the large, unconscious eyes, and fat, dimpled cheeks of the little one.

It was evident that neither of them had ever seen a baby like that before.

"But really, Mary," said the young man, "isn't three dollars very high?"

Mary very prudently said nothing, but taking the little bonnet, tied it on the little head, and held up the baby. The man looked, and without another word down went the three dollars--all the avails of last week's butter; and as they walked out of the shop, it is hard to say which looked the more delighted with the bargain.

"Ah," thought I, "a little child shall lead them."

Another day, as I was passing a carriage factory along one of our principal back streets, I saw a young mechanic at work on a wheel. The rough body of a carriage stood beside him, and there, wrapped up snugly, all hooded and cloaked, sat a little dark-eyed girl, about a year old, playing with a great, shaggy dog. As I stopped, the man looked up from his work, and turned admiringly towards his little companion, as much as to say, "See what I have got here!"

"Yes," thought I; "and if the little lady ever gets a glance from admiring swains as sincere as that, she will be lucky."

Ah, these children, little witches, pretty even in all their faults and absurdities. See, for example, yonder little fellow in a naughty fit. He has shaken his long curls over his deep blue eyes; the fair brow is bent in a frown, the rose leaf lip is pursed up in infinite defiance, and the white shoulder thrust angrily forward. Can any but a child look so pretty, even in its naughtiness?

Then comes the instant change; flashing smiles and tears as the good comes back all in a rush, and you are overwhelmed with protestations, promises, and kisses! They are irresistible, too, these little ones. They pull away the scholar's pen, tumble about his paper, make somersets over his books; and what can he do? They tear up newspapers, litter the carpets, break, pull, and upset, and then jabber unheard-of English in self-defense; and what can you do for yourself?

"If I had a child," says the precise man, "you should see."

He does have a child, and his child tears up his papers, tumbles over his things, and pulls his nose like all other children; and what has the precise man to say for himself? Nothing; he is like everybody else; "a little child shall lead him."

The hardened heart of the worldly man is unlocked by the guileless tones and simple caresses of his son; but he repays it in time, by imparting to his boy all the crooked tricks and callous maxims which have undone himself.

Go to the jail, to the penitentiary, and find there the wretch most sullen, brutal, and hardened. Then look at your infant son. Such as he is to you, such to some mother was this man. That hard hand was soft and delicate; that rough voice was tender and lisping; fond eyes followed him as he played, and he was rocked and cradled as something holy. There was a time when his heart, soft and unworn, might have opened to questionings of God and Jesus, and been sealed with the seal of Heaven. But harsh hands seized it; fierce goblin lineaments were impressed upon it; and all is over with him forever!

So of the tender, weeping child is made the callous, heartless man; of the all-believing child, the sneering skeptic; of the beautiful and modest, the shameless and abandoned; and this is what the world does for the little one.

There was a time when the divine One stood on earth, and little children sought to draw near to him. But harsh human beings stood between him and them, forbidding their approach. Ah, has it not always been so? Do not even we, with our hard and unsubdued feelings, our worldly and unspiritual habits and maxims, stand like a dark screen between our little child and its Saviour, and keep even from the choice bud of our hearts the sweet radiance which might unfold it for paradise? "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not," is still the voice of the Son of God; but the cold world still closes around and forbids. When, of old, disciples would question their Lord of the higher mysteries of his kingdom, he took a little child and set him in the midst, as a sign of him who should be greatest in heaven. That gentle teacher remains still to us. By every hearth and fireside Jesus still sets the little child in the midst of us.

Wouldst thou know, O parent, what is that faith which unlocks heaven? Go not to wrangling polemics, or creeds and forms of theology, but draw to thy bosom thy little one, and read in that clear, trusting eye the lesson of eternal life. Be only to thy God as thy child is to thee, and all is done. Blessed shalt thou be, indeed, "when a little child shall lead thee."

THE OLD OAK OF ANDOVER

A REVERIE

Silently, with dreamy languor, the fleecy snow is falling. Through the windows, flowery with blossoming geranium and heliotrope, through the downward sweep of crimson and muslin curtain, one watches it as the wind whirls and sways it in swift eddies.

Right opposite our house, on our Mount Clear, is an old oak, the apostle of the primeval forest. Once, when this place was all wildwood, the man who was seeking a spot for the location of the buildings of Phillips Academy climbed this oak, using it as a sort of green watch-tower, from whence he might gain a view of the surrounding country. Age and time, since then, have dealt hardly with the stanch old fellow. His limbs have been here and there shattered; his back begins to look mossy and dilapidated; but, after all, there is a piquant, decided air about him, that speaks the old age of a tree of distinction, a kingly oak. To-day I see him standing, dimly revealed through the mist of falling snows; to-morrow's sun will show the outline of his gnarled limbs--all rose color with their soft snow burden; and again a few months, and spring will breathe on him, and he will draw a long breath, and break out once more, for the three hundredth time, perhaps, into a vernal crown of leaves. I sometimes think that leaves are the thoughts of trees, and that if we only knew it, we should find their life's experience recorded in them. Our oak! what a crop of meditations and remembrances must he have thrown forth, leafing out century after century. Awhile he spake and thought only of red deer and Indians; of the trillium that opened its white triangle in his shade; of the scented arbutus, fair as the pink ocean shell, weaving her fragrant mats in the moss at his feet; of feathery ferns, casting their silent shadows on the checkerberry leaves, and all those sweet, wild, nameless, half-mossy things, that live in the gloom of forests, and are only desecrated when brought to scientific light, laid out and stretched on a botanic bier. Sweet old forest days!--when blue jay, and yellowhammer, and bobolink made his leaves merry, and summer was a long opera of such music as Mozart dimly dreamed. But then came human kind bustling beneath; wondering, fussing, exploring, measuring, treading down flowers, cutting down trees, scaring bobolinks--and Andover, as men say, began to be settled.

Stanch men were they--these Puritan fathers of Andover. The old oak must have felt them something akin to himself. Such strong, wrestling limbs had they, so gnarled and knotted were they, yet so outbursting with a green and vernal crown, yearly springing, of noble and generous thoughts, rustling with leaves which shall be for the healing of nations.

These men were content with the hard, dry crust for themselves, that they might sow seeds of abundant food for us, their children; men out of whose hardness in enduring we gain leisure to be soft and graceful, through whose poverty we have become rich. Like Moses, they had for their portion only the pain and weariness of the wilderness, leaving to us the fruition of the promised land. Let us cherish for their sake the old oak, beautiful in its age as the broken statue of some antique wrestler, brown with time, yet glorious in its suggestion of past achievement.

I think all this the more that I have recently come across the following passage in one of our religious papers. The writer expresses a kind of sentiment which one meets very often upon this subject, and leads one to wonder what glamour could have fallen on the minds of any of the descendants of the Puritans, that they should cast nettles on those honored graves where they should be proud to cast their laurels.

"It is hard," he says, "for a lover of the beautiful--not a mere lover, but a believer in its divinity also--to forgive the Puritans, or to think charitably of them. It is hard for him to keep Forefathers' Day, or to subscribe to the Plymouth Monument; hard to look fairly at what they did, with the memory of what they destroyed rising up to choke thankfulness; for they were as one-sided and narrow-minded a set of men as ever lived, and saw one of Truth's faces only--the hard, stern, practical face, without loveliness, without beauty, and only half dear to God. The Puritan flew in the face of facts, not because he saw them and disliked them, but because he did not see them. He saw foolishness, lying, stealing, worldliness,--the very mammon of unrighteousness rioting in the world and bearing sway,--and he ran full tilt against the monster, hating it with a very mortal and mundane hatred, and anxious to see it bite the dust that his own horn might be exalted. It was in truth only another horn of the old dilemma, tossing and goring grace and beauty, and all the loveliness of life, as if they were the enemies instead of the sure friends of God and man."

Now, to those who say this we must ask the question with which Socrates of old pursued the sophist: What is beauty? If beauty be only physical, if it appeal only to the senses, if it be only an enchantment of graceful forms, sweet sounds, then indeed there might be something of truth in this sweeping declaration that the Puritan spirit is the enemy of beauty.

The very root and foundation of all artistic inquiry lies here. What is beauty? And to this question God forbid that we Christians should give a narrower answer than Plato gave in the old times before Christ arose, for he directs the aspirant who would discover the beautiful to "consider of greater value the beauty existing _in the soul_, than that existing in the body." More gracefully he teaches the same doctrine when he tells us that "there are two kinds of Venus (beauty); the one, the elder, who had no mother, and was the daughter of Uranus (heaven), whom we name the celestial; the other, younger, daughter of Jupiter and Dione, whom we call the vulgar."

Now, if disinterestedness, faith, patience, piety, have a beauty celestial and divine, then were our fathers worshipers of the beautiful. If high-mindedness and spotless honor are beautiful things, they had those. What work of art can compare with a lofty and heroic life? Is it not better to be a Moses than to be a Michael Angelo making statues of Moses? Is not the life of Paul a sublimer work of art than Raphael's cartoons? Are not the patience, the faith, the undying love of Mary by the cross, more beautiful than all the Madonna paintings in the world. If, then, we would speak truly of our fathers, we should say that, having their minds fixed on that celestial beauty of which Plato speaks, they held in slight esteem that more common and earthly.

Should we continue the parable in Plato's manner, we might say that the earthly and visible Venus, the outward grace of art and nature, was ordained of God as a priestess, through whom men were to gain access to the divine, invisible One; but that men, in their blindness, ever worship the priestess instead of the divinity.

Therefore it is that great reformers so often must break the shrines and temples of the physical and earthly beauty, when they seek to draw men upward to that which is high and divine.

Christ says of John the Baptist, "What went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold they which are clothed in soft raiment are in kings' palaces." So was it when our fathers came here. There were enough wearing soft raiment and dwelling in kings' palaces. Life in papal Rome and prelatic England was weighed down with blossoming luxury. There were abundance of people to think of pictures, and statues, and gems, and cameos, vases and marbles, and all manner of deliciousness. The world was all drunk with the enchantments of the lower Venus, and it was needful that these men should come, Baptist-like in the wilderness, in raiment of camel's hair. We need such men now. Art, they tell us, is waking in America; a love of the beautiful is beginning to unfold its wings; but what kind of art, and what kind of beauty? Are we to fill our houses with pictures and gems, and to see that even our drinking cup and vase are wrought in graceful pattern, and to lose our reverence for self-denial, honor, and faith?

Is our Venus to be the frail, ensnaring Aphrodite, or the starry, divine Urania?

THE ELDER'S FEAST

A TRADITION OF LAODICEA

At a certain time in the earlier ages there lived in the city of Laodicea a Christian elder of some repute, named Onesiphorus. The world had smiled on him, and though a Christian, he was rich and full of honors. All men, even the heathen, spoke well of him, for he was a man courteous of speech and mild of manner.

His wife, a fair Ionian lady but half reclaimed from idolatry, though baptized and accredited as a member of the Christian Church, still lingered lovingly on the confines of old heathenism, and if she did not believe, still cherished with pleasure the poetic legends of Apollo and Venus, of Jove and Diana.

A large and fair family of sons and daughters had risen around these parents; but their education had been much after the rudiments of this world, and not after Christ. Though, according to the customs of the church, they were brought to the font of baptism, and sealed in the name of the Father, and the Son, and Holy Ghost, and although daily, instead of libations to the Penates, or flower offerings to Diana and Juno, the name of Jesus was invoked, yet the _spirit_ of Jesus was wanting. The chosen associates of all these children, as they grew older, were among the heathen; and daily they urged their parents, by their entreaties, to conform, in one thing after another, to heathen usage. "Why should we be singular, mother?" said the dark-eyed Myrrah, as she bound her hair and arranged her dress after the fashion of the girls in the temple of Venus. "Why may we not wear the golden ornaments and images which have been consecrated to heathen goddesses?" said the sprightly Thalia; "surely none others are to be bought, and are we to do altogether without?" "And why may we not be at feasts where libations are made to Apollo or Jupiter?" said the sons; "so long as we do not consent to it or believe in it, will our faith be shaken thereby?" "How are we ever to reclaim the heathen, if we do not mingle among them?" said another son; "did not our Master eat with publicans and sinners?"

It was, however, to be remarked, that no conversions of the heathen to Christianity ever took place through the means of these complying sons and daughters, or any of the number who followed their example. Instead of withdrawing any from the confines of heathenism, they themselves were drawn so nearly over, that in certain situations and circumstances they would undoubtedly have been ranked among them by any but a most scrutinizing observer. If any in the city of Laodicea were ever led to unite themselves with Jesus, it was by means of a few who observed the full simplicity of the ancient faith, and who, though honest, tender, and courteous in all their dealings with the heathen, still went not a step with them in conformity to any of their customs.

In time, though the family we speak of never broke off from the Christian Church, yet if you had been in it, you might have heard much warm and earnest conversation about things that took place at the baths, or in feasts to various divinities; but if any one spoke of Jesus, there was immediately a cold silence, a decorous, chilling, respectful pause, after which the conversation, with a bound, flew back into the old channel again.

* * * * *

It was now night; and the house of Onesiphorus the Elder was blazing with torches, alive with music, and all the hurry and stir of a sumptuous banquet. All the wealth and fashion of Laodicea were there, Christian and heathen; and all that the classic voluptuousness of Oriental Greece could give to shed enchantment over the scene was there. In ancient times the festivals of Christians in Laodicea had been regulated in the spirit of the command of Jesus, as recorded by Luke, whose classical Greek had made his the established version in Asia Minor. "And thou, when thou makest a feast, call not thy friends and thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbors, lest they also bid thee, and a recompense be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, and the maimed, and the lame, and the blind, and thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee, but thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just."

That very day, before the entertainment, had this passage been quoted in the ears of the family by Cleon, the youngest son, who, different from all his family, had cherished in his bosom the simplicity of the old belief.

"How ridiculous! how absurd!" had been the reply of the more thoughtless members of the family, when Cleon cited the above passage as in point to the evening's entertainment. The dark-eyed mother looked reproof on the levity of the younger children, and decorously applauded the passage, which she said had no application to the matter in hand.

"But, mother, even if the passage be not literally taken, it must mean something. What did the Lord Jesus intend by it? If we Christians may make entertainments with all the parade and expense of our heathen neighbors, and thus spend the money that might be devoted to charity, what does this passage mean?"

"Your father gives in charity as handsomely as any Christian in Laodicea," said his mother warmly.

"Nay, mother, that may be; but I bethink me now of two or three times when means have been wanting for the relieving of the poor, and the ransoming of captives, and the support of apostles, when we have said that we could give no more."

"My son," said his mother, "you do not understand the ways of the world."

"Nay, how should he," said Thalia, "shut up day and night with that old papyrus of St. Luke and Paul's Epistles? One may have too much of a good thing."

"But does not the holy Paul say, 'Be not conformed to this world'?"

"Certainly," said the elder; "that means that we should be baptized, and not worship in the heathen temples."

"My dear son," said his mother, "you intend well, doubtless; but you have not sufficient knowledge of life to estimate our relations to society. Entertainments of this sort are absolutely necessary to sustain our position in the world. If we accept, we must return them."

But not to dwell on this conversation, let us suppose ourselves in the rooms now glittering with lights, and gay with every costly luxury of wealth and taste. Here were statues to Diana and Apollo, and to the household Juno--not meant for worship--of course not--but simply to conform to the general usages of good society; and so far had this complaisance been carried, that the shrine of a peerless Venus was adorned with garlands and votive offerings, and an exquisitely wrought silver censer diffused its perfume on the marble altar in front. This complaisance on the part of some of the younger members of the family drew from the elder a gentle remonstrance, as having an unseemly appearance for those bearing the Christian name; but they readily answered, "Has not Paul said, 'We know that an idol is nothing'? Where is the harm of an elegant statue, considered merely as a consummate work of art? As for the flowers, are they not simply the most appropriate ornament? And where is the harm of burning exquisite perfume? And is it worse to burn it in one place than another?"

"Upon my sword," said one of the heathen guests, as he wandered through the gay scene, "how liberal and accommodating these Christians are becoming! Except in a few small matters in the temple, they seem to be with us entirely."

"Ah," said another, "it was not so years back. Nothing was heard among them, then, but prayers, and alms, and visits to the poor and sick; and when they met together in their feasts, there was so much of their talk of Christ, and such singing of hymns and prayer, that one of us found himself quite out of place."

"Yes," said an old man present, "in those days I quite bethought me of being some day a Christian; but look you, they are grown so near like us now, it is scarce worth one's while to change. A little matter of ceremony in the temple, and offering incense to Jesus, instead of Jupiter, when all else is the same, can make small odds in a man."

But now, the ancient legend goes on to say, that in the midst of that gay and brilliant evening, a stranger of remarkable appearance and manners was noticed among the throng. None knew him, or whence he came. He mingled not in the mirth, and seemed to recognize no one present, though he regarded all that was passing with a peculiar air of still and earnest attention; and wherever he moved, his calm, penetrating gaze seemed to diffuse a singular uneasiness about him. Now his eye was fixed with a quiet scrutiny on the idolatrous statues, with their votive adornments--now it followed earnestly the young forms that were wreathing in the graceful waves of the dance; and then he turned toward the tables, loaded with every luxury and sparkling with wines, where the devotion to Bacchus became more than poetic fiction; and as he gazed, a high, indignant sorrow seemed to overshadow the calmness of his majestic face. When, in thoughtless merriment, some of the gay company sought to address him, they found themselves shrinking involuntarily from the soft, piercing eye, and trembling at the low, sweet tones in which he replied. What he spoke was brief; but there was a gravity and tender wisdom in it that strangely contrasted with the frivolous scene, and awakened unwonted ideas of heavenly purity even in thoughtless and dissipated minds.

The only one of the company who seemed to seek his society was the youngest, the fair little child Isa. She seemed as strangely attracted towards him as others were repelled; and when, unsolicited, in the frank confidence of childhood she pressed to his side, and placed her little hand in his, the look of radiant compassion and tenderness which beamed down from those eyes was indeed glorious to behold. Yet here and there, as he glided among the crowd, he spoke in the ear of some Christian words which, though soft and low, seemed to have a mysterious and startling power; for one after another, pensive, abashed, and confounded, they drew aside from the gay scene, and seemed lost in thought. That stranger--who was he? Who? The inquiry passed from mouth to mouth, and one and another, who had listened to his low, earnest tones, looked on each other with a troubled air. Erelong he had glided hither and thither in the crowd; he had spoken in the ear of every Christian--and suddenly again he was gone, and they saw him no more. Each had felt the heart thrill within--each spirit had vibrated as if the finger of its Creator had touched it, and shrunk conscious as if an omniscient eye were upon it. Each heart was stirred from its depths. Vain sophistries, worldly maxims, making the false look true, all appeared to rise and clear away like a mist; and at once each one seemed to see, as God sees, the true state of the inner world, the true motive and reason of action, and in the instinctive pause that passed through the company, the banquet was broken up and deserted.

"And what if their God were present?" said one of the heathen members of the company, next day. "Why did they all look so blank? A most favorable omen, we should call it, to have one's patron divinity at a feast."

"Besides," said another, "these Christians hold that their God is always everywhere present; so, at most, they have but had their eyes opened to see Him who is always there!"

* * * * *

What is practically the meaning of the precept, "Be not conformed to the world"? In its every-day results, it presents many problems difficult of solution. There are so many shades and blendings of situation and circumstances, so many things, innocent and graceful in themselves, which, like flowers and incense on a heathen altar, become unchristian only through position and circumstances, that the most honest and well-intentioned are often perplexed.

That we must conform in some things is conceded; yet the whole tenor of the New Testament shows that this conformity must have its limits--that Christians are to be transformed, so as to exhibit to the world a higher and more complete style of life, and thus "prove what is the good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God."

But in many particulars as to style of living and modes of social intercourse, there can be no definite rules laid down, and no Christian can venture to judge another by his standard.

One Christian condemns dress adornment, and the whole application of taste to the usages of life, as a sinful waste of time and money. Another, perceiving in every work of God a love and appreciation of the beautiful, believes that there is a sphere in which he is pleased to see the same trait in his children, if the indulgence do not become excessive, and thus interfere with higher duties.

One condemns all time and expense laid out in social visiting as so much waste. Another remembers that Jesus, when just entering on the most vast and absorbing work, turned aside to attend a wedding feast, and wrought his first miracle to enhance its social enjoyment. Again, there are others who, because some indulgence of taste and some exercise for the social powers are admissible, go all lengths in extravagance, and in company, dress, and the externals of life.

In the same manner, with regard to style of life and social entertainment--most of the items which go to constitute what is called style of living, or the style of particular parties, may be in themselves innocent, and yet they may be so interwoven and combined with evils, that the whole effect shall be felt to be decidedly unchristian, both by Christians and the world. How, then, shall the well-disposed person know where to stop, and how to strike the just medium?

We know of but one safe rule: read the life of Jesus with attention--study it--inquire earnestly with yourself, "What sort of a person, in thought, in feeling, in action, was my Saviour?"--live in constant sympathy and communion with him--and there will be within a kind of instinctive rule by which to try all things. A young man, who was to be exposed to the temptations of one of the most dissipated European capitals, carried with him his father's picture, and hung it in his apartment. Before going out to any of the numerous resorts of the city, he was accustomed to contemplate this picture, and say to himself, "Would my father wish to see me in the place to which I am going?" and thus was he saved from many a temptation. In like manner the Christian, who has always by his side the beautiful ideal of his Saviour, finds it a holy charm, by which he is gently restrained from all that is unsuitable to his profession. He has but to inquire of any scene or employment, "Should I be well pleased to meet my Saviour there? Would the trains of thought I should there fall into, the state of mind that would there be induced, be such as would harmonize with an interview with him?" Thus protected and defended, social enjoyment might be like that of Mary and John, and the disciples, when, under the mild, approving eye of the Son of God, they shared the festivities of Cana.

A SCENE IN JERUSALEM

It is now nearly noon, the busiest and most bustling hour of the day; yet the streets of the Holy City seem deserted and silent as the grave. The artisan has left his bench, the merchant his merchandise; the throngs of returned wanderers which this great national festival has brought up from every land of the earth, and which have been for the last week carrying life and motion through every street, seem suddenly to have disappeared. Here and there solitary footfalls, like the last pattering rain-drops after a shower, awaken the echoes of the streets; and here and there some lonely woman looks from the housetop with anxious and agitated face, as if she would discern something in the far distance.

Alone, or almost alone, the few remaining priests move like white-winged, solitary birds over the gorgeous pavements of the temple, and as they mechanically conduct the ministrations of the day, cast significant glances on each other, and pause here and there to converse in anxious whispers.

Ah, there is one voice which they have often heard beneath those arches--a voice which ever bore in it a mysterious and thrilling charm--which they know will be hushed to-day. Chief priest, scribe, and doctor have all gone out in the death procession after him; and these few remaining ones, far from the excitement of the crowd, and busied in calm and sacred duties, find voices of anxious questioning rising from the depths of their own souls, "What if this indeed were the Christ?"

But pass we on out of the city, and what a surging tide of life and motion meets the eye, as if all nations under heaven had dashed their waves of population on this Judæan shore! A noisy, wrathful, tempestuous mob, billow on billow, waver and rally round some central object, which it conceals from view. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia and Egypt, strangers of Rome, Cretes and Arabians, Jew and Proselyte, convoked from the ends of the earth, throng in agitated concourse one on another; one theme in every face, on every tongue, one name in every variety of accent and dialect passing from lip to lip--

"Jesus of Nazareth."

Look on that man--the centre and cause of all this outburst! He stands there alone. The cross is ready. It lies beneath his feet. The rough hand of a brutal soldier has seized his robe to tear it from him. Another with stalwart arm is boring the holes, gazing upward the while with a face of stupid unconcern. There on the ground lie the hammer and the nails: the hour, the moment of doom is come! Look on this man, as upward, with deep, sorrowing eyes, he gazes towards heaven. Hears he the roar of the mob? Feels he the rough hand on his garment? Nay, he sees not, feels not: from all the rage and tumult of the hour he is rapt away. A sorrow deeper, more absorbing, more unearthly seems to possess him, as upward with long gaze he looks to that heaven never before closed to his prayer, to that God never before to him invisible. That mournful, heaven-searching glance, in its lonely anguish, says but one thing: "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God."

Through a life of sorrow the realized love of his Father has shone like a precious and beautiful talisman in his bosom; but now, when desolation and anguish have come upon him as a whirlwind, this last star has gone out in the darkness, and Jesus, deserted by man and God, stands there alone.

Alone? No; for undaunted by the cruel mob, fearless in the strength of mortal anguish, helpless, yet undismayed, stands the one blessed among women, the royal daughter of a noble line, the priestess to whose care was intrusted this spotless sacrifice. She and her son, last of a race of kings, stand there despised, rejected, and disavowed by their nation, to accomplish dread words of prophecy, which have swept down for far ages to this hour.

Strange it is, in this dark scene, to see the likeness between mother and son, deepening in every line of those faces, as they stand thus thrown out by the dark background of rage and hate, which like a storm-cloud lowers around. The same rapt, absorbed, calm intensity of anguish in both mother and son, save only that while he gazes upward towards God, she, with like fervor, gazes on him. What to her is the deriding mob, the coarse taunt, the brutal abuse? Of it all she hears, she feels nothing. She sinks not, faints not, weeps not; her whole being concentrates in the will to suffer by and with him to the last. Other hearts there are that beat for him; others that press into the doomed circle, and own him amid the scorn of thousands. There may you see the clasped hands and upraised eyes of a Magdalen, the pale and steady resolve of John, the weeping company of women who bewailed and lamented him; but none dare press so near, or seem so identical with him in his sufferings, as this mother.

And as we gaze on these two in human form, surrounded by other human forms, how strange the contrast! How is it possible that human features and human lineaments essentially alike can be wrought into such heaven-wide contrast? Man is he who stands there, lofty and spotless, in bleeding patience! Men also are those brutal soldiers, alike stupidly ready, at the word of command, to drive the nail through quivering flesh or insensate wood. Men are those scowling priests and infuriate Pharisees. Men, also, the shifting figures of the careless rabble, who shout and curse without knowing why. No visible glory shines round that head; yet how, spite of every defilement cast upon him by the vulgar rabble, seems that form to be glorified! What light is that in those eyes! What mournful beauty in that face! What solemn, mysterious sacredness investing the whole form, constraining from us the exclamation, "Surely this is the Son of God." Man's voice is breathing vulgar taunt and jeer: "He saved others; himself he cannot save." "He trusted in God; let him deliver him if he will have him." And man's, also, clear, sweet, unearthly, pierces that stormy mob, saying, "Father, forgive them; they know not what they do."

But we draw the veil in reverence. It is not ours to picture what the sun refused to shine upon, and earth shook to behold.

Little thought those weeping women, that stricken disciple, that heartbroken mother, how on some future day that cross--emblem to them of deepest infamy--should blaze in the eye of all nations, symbol of triumph and hope, glittering on gorgeous fanes, embroidered on regal banners, associated with all that is revered and powerful on earth. The Roman ensign that waved on that mournful day, symbol of highest earthly power, is a thing mouldered and forgotten; and over all the high places of old Rome, herself, stands that mystical cross, no longer speaking of earthly anguish and despair, but of heavenly glory, honor, and immortality.

Theologians have endlessly disputed and philosophized on this great fact of atonement. The Bible tells only that this tragic event was the essential point without which our salvation could never have been secured. But where lay the necessity they do not say. What was that dread strait that either the divine One must thus suffer, or man be lost, who knoweth?

To this question answer a thousand voices, with each a different solution, urged with equal confidence--each solution to its framer as certain and sacred as the dread fact it explains--yet every one, perhaps, unsatisfactory to the deep-questioning soul. The Bible, as it always does, gives on this point not definitions or distinct outlines, but images--images which lose all their glory and beauty if seized by the harsh hands of metaphysical analysis, but inexpressibly affecting to the unlettered human heart, which softens in gazing on their mournful and mysterious beauty. Christ is called our sacrifice, our passover, our atoning high priest; and he himself, while holding in his hands the emblem cup, says, "It is my blood shed for many, for the remission of sins." Let us reason on it as we will, this story of the cross, presented without explanation in the simple metaphor of the Bible, has produced an effect on human nature wholly unaccountable. In every age and clime, with every variety of habit, thought, and feeling, from the cannibals of New Zealand and Madagascar to the most enlightened and scientific minds in Christendom, one feeling, essentially homogeneous in its character and results, has arisen in view of this cross. There is something in it that strikes one of the great nerves of simple, unsophisticated humanity, and meets its wants as nothing else will. Ages ago, Paul declared to philosophizing Greek and scornful Roman that he was not ashamed of this gospel, and alleged for his reason this very adaptedness to humanity. _A priori_, many would have said that Paul should have told of Christ living, Christ preaching, Christ working miracles, not omitting also the pathetic history of how he sealed all with his blood; but Paul declared that he determined to know nothing else but Christ crucified. He said it was a stumbling-block to the Jew, an absurdity to the Greek; yet he was none the less positive in his course. True, there were many then, as now, who looked on with the most philosophic and cultivated indifference. The courtly Festus, as he settled his purple tunic, declared he could make nothing of the matter, only a dispute about one Jesus, who was dead, and whom Paul affirmed to be alive; and perchance some Athenian, as he reclined on his ivory couch at dinner, after the sermon on Mars Hill, may have disposed of the matter very summarily, and passed on to criticisms on Samian wine and marble vases. Yet in spite of their disbelief, this story of Christ has outlived them, their age and nation, and is to this hour as fresh in human hearts as if it were just published. This "one Jesus which was dead, and whom Paul affirmed to be alive," is nominally, at least, the object of religious homage in all the more cultivated portions of the globe; and to hearts scattered through all regions of the earth this same Jesus is now a sacred and living name, dearer than all household sounds, all ties of blood, all sweetest and nearest affections of humanity. "I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die for the name of the Lord Jesus," are words that have found an echo in the bosoms of thousands in every age since then; that would, if need were, find no less echo in thousands now. Considering Christ as a man, and his death as a mere pathetic story,--considering him as one of the great martyrs for truth, who sealed it with his blood,--this result is wholly unaccountable. Other martyrs have died, bravely and tenderly, in their last hours "bearing witness of the godlike" that is in man; but who so remembers them? Who so loves them? To whom is any one of them a living presence, a life, and all? Yet so thousands look on Jesus at this hour.

Nay, it is because this story strikes home to every human bosom as an individual concern. A thrilling voice speaks from this scene of anguish to every human bosom: This is thy Saviour. Thy sin hath done this. It is the appropriative words, thine and mine, which make this history different from any other history. This was for _me_, is the thought which has pierced the apathy of the Greenlander, and kindled the stolid clay of the Hottentot; and no human bosom has ever been found so low, so lost, so guilty, so despairing, that this truth, once received, has not had power to redeem, regenerate, and disenthrall. Christ so presented becomes to every human being a friend nearer than the mother who bore him; and the more degraded, the more hopeless and polluted is the nature, the stronger comes on the living reaction, if this belief is really and vividly enkindled with it. But take away this appropriative, individual element, and this legend of Jesus' death has no more power than any other. He is to us no more than Washington, or Socrates, or Howard. And where is there not a touchstone to try every theory of atonement? Whatever makes a man feel that he is only a spectator, an uninterested judge in this matter, is surely astray from the idea of the Bible. Whatever makes him feel that his sins have done this deed, that he is bound, soul and body, to this Deliverer, though it may be in many points philosophically erroneous, cannot go far astray.

If we could tell the number of the stars, and call them forth by name, then, perhaps, might we solve all the mystic symbols by which the Bible has shadowed forth the far-lying necessities and reachings-forth of this event "among principalities and powers," and in "ages to come." But he who knows nothing of all this, who shall so present the atonement as to bind and affiance human souls indissolubly to their Redeemer, does all that could be done by the highest and most perfect knowledge.

The great object is accomplished, when the soul, rapt, inspired, feels the deep resolve:--

"Remember Thee! Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial, fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter."

THE OLD MEETING-HOUSE

SKETCH FROM THE NOTE-BOOK OF AN OLD GENTLEMAN

Never shall I forget the dignity and sense of importance which swelled my mind when I was first pronounced old enough to go to meeting. That eventful Sunday I was up long before day, and even took my Sabbath suit to the window to ascertain by the first light that it actually was there, just as it looked the night before. With what complacency did I view myself completely dressed! How did I count over the rows of yellow gilt buttons on my coat! how my good mother, grandmother, and aunts fussed, and twitched, and pulled, to make everything set up and set down, just in the proper place! how my clean, starched white collar was turned over and smoothed again and again, and my golden curls twisted and arranged to make the most of me! and, last of all, how I was cautioned not to be thinking of my clothes. In truth, I was in those days a very handsome youngster, and it really is no more than justice to let the fact be known, as there is nothing in my present appearance from which it could ever be inferred. Everybody in the house successively asked me if I should be a good boy, and sit still, and not talk, nor laugh; and my mother informed me, _in terrorem_, that there was a tithing man, who carried off naughty children, and shut them up in a dark place behind the pulpit; and that this tithing man, Mr. Zephaniah Scranton, sat just where he could see me. This fact impressed my mind with more solemnity than all the exhortations which had preceded it--a proof of the efficacy of facts above reason. Under shadow and power of this weighty truth, I demurely took hold of my mother's forefinger to walk to meeting.

The traveler in New England, as he stands on some eminence, and looks down on its rich landscape of golden grain and waving cornfield, sees no feature more beautiful than its simple churches, whose white taper fingers point upward, amid the greenness and bloom of the distant prospects, as if to remind one of the overshadowing providence whence all this luxuriant beauty flows; and year by year, as new ones are added to the number, or succeed in the place of old ones, there is discernible an evident improvement in their taste and architecture. Those modest Doric little buildings, with their white pillars, green blinds, and neat inclosures, are very different affairs from those great, uncouth mountains of windows and doors that stood in the same place years before. To my childish eye, however, our old meeting-house was an awe-inspiring thing. To me it seemed fashioned very nearly on the model of Noah's ark and Solomon's temple, as set forth in the pictures in my Scripture Catechism--pictures which I did not doubt were authentic copies; and what more respectable and venerable architectural precedent could any one desire? Its double rows of windows, of which I knew the number by heart, its doors with great wooden quirls over them, its belfry projecting out at the east end, its steeple and bell, all inspired as much sense of the sublime in me as Strasbourg Cathedral itself; and the inside was not a whit less imposing.

How magnificent, to my eye, seemed the turnip-like canopy that hung over the minister's head, hooked by a long iron rod to the wall above! and how apprehensively did I consider the question, what would become of him if it should fall! How did I wonder at the panels on either side of the pulpit, in each of which was carved and painted a flaming red tulip, bolt upright, with its leaves projecting out at right angles! and then at the grapevine, bas-relieved on the front, with its exactly triangular bunches of grapes, alternating at exact intervals with exactly triangular leaves. To me it was an indisputable representation of how grapevines ought to look, if they would only be straight and regular, instead of curling and scrambling, and twisting themselves into all sorts of slovenly shapes. The area of the house was divided into large square pews, boxed up with stout boards, and surmounted with a kind of baluster work, which I supposed to be provided for the special accommodation of us youngsters, being the "loopholes of retreat" through which we gazed on the "remarkabilia" of the scene. It was especially interesting to me to notice the coming in to meeting of the congregation. The doors were so contrived that on entering you stepped down instead of up--a construction that has more than once led to unlucky results in the case of strangers. I remember once when an unlucky Frenchman, entirely unsuspicious of the danger that awaited him, made entrance by pitching devoutly upon his nose in the middle of the broad aisle; that it took three bunches of my grandmother's fennel to bring my risibles into anything like composure. Such exhibitions, fortunately for me, were very rare; but still I found great amusement in watching the distinctive and marked outlines of the various people that filled up the seats around me. A Yankee village presents a picture of the curiosities of every generation: there from year to year, they live on, preserved by hard labor and regular habits, exhibiting every peculiarity of manner and appearance, as distinctly marked as when they first came from the mint of nature. And as everybody goes punctually to meeting, the meeting-house becomes a sort of museum of antiquities--a general muster ground for past and present.

I remember still with what wondering admiration I used to look around on the people that surrounded our pew. On one side there was an old Captain McLean, and Major McDill, a couple whom the mischievous wits of the village designated as Captain McLean and Captain McFat; and, in truth, they were a perfect antithesis, a living exemplification of flesh and spirit. Captain McLean was a mournful, lengthy, considerate-looking old gentleman, with a long face, digressing into a long, thin, horny nose, which, when he applied his pocket-handkerchief, gave forth a melancholy, minor-keyed sound, such as a ghost might make, using a pocket-handkerchief in the long gallery of some old castle.

Close at his side was the doughty, puffing Captain McDill, whose full-orbed, jolly visage was illuminated by a most valiant red nose, shaped something like an overgrown doughnut, and looking as if it had been thrown at his face, and happened to hit in the middle. Then there was old Israel Peters, with a wooden leg, which tramped into meeting, with undeviating regularity, ten minutes before meeting time; and there was Jedediah Stebbins, a thin, wistful, moonshiny-looking old gentleman, whose mouth appeared as if it had been gathered up with a needle and thread, and whose eyes seemed as if they had been bound with red tape; and there was old Benaiah Stephens, who used regularly to get up and stand when the minister was about half through his sermon, exhibiting his tall figure, long, single-breasted coat, with buttons nearly as large as a tea plate; his large, black, horn spectacles stretched down on the extreme end of a very long nose, and vigorously chewing, meanwhile, on the bunch of caraway which he always carried in one hand. Then there was Aunt Sally Stimpson, and old Widow Smith, and a whole bevy of little, dried old ladies, with small, straight, black bonnets, tight sleeves to the elbow, long silk gloves, and great fans, big enough for a windmill; and of a hot day it was a great amusement to me to watch the bobbing of the little black bonnets, which showed that sleep had got the better of their owners' attention, and the sputter and rustling of the fans, when a more profound nod than common would suddenly waken them, and set them to fanning and listening with redoubled devotion. There was Deacon Dundas, a great wagon load of an old gentleman, whose ample pockets looked as if they might have held half the congregation, who used to establish himself just on one side of me, and seemed to feel such entire confidence in the soundness and capacity of his pastor that he could sleep very comfortably from one end of the sermon to the other. Occasionally, to be sure, one of your officious blue flies, who, as everybody knows, are amazingly particular about such matters, would buzz into his mouth, or flirt into his ears a passing admonition as to the impropriety of sleeping in meeting, when the good old gentleman would start, open his eyes very wide, and look about with a resolute air, as much as to say, "I wasn't asleep, I can tell you;" and then setting himself in an edifying posture of attention, you might perceive his head gradually settling back, his mouth slowly opening wider and wider, till the good man would go off again soundly asleep, as if nothing had happened.

It was a good orthodox custom of old times to take every part of the domestic establishment to meeting, even down to the faithful dog, who, as he had supervised the labors of the week, also came with due particularity to supervise the worship of Sunday. I think I can see now the fitting out on a Sunday morning--the one wagon, or two, as the case might be, tackled up with an "old gray" or an "old bay," with a buffalo skin over the seat by way of cushion, and all the family, in their Sunday best, packed in for meeting; while Master Bose, Watch, or Towser stood prepared to be an outguard, and went meekly trotting up hill and down dale in the rear. Arrived at meeting, the canine part of the establishment generally conducted themselves with great decorum, lying down and going to sleep as decently as anybody present, except when some of the business-loving bluebottles aforesaid would make a sortie upon them, when you might hear the snap of their jaws as they vainly sought to lay hold of the offender. Now and then, between some of the sixthlies, seventhlies, and eighthlies, you might hear some old patriarch giving himself a rousing shake, and pitpatting soberly up the aisles, as if to see that everything was going on properly, after which he would lie down and compose himself to sleep again; and certainly this was as improving a way of spending Sunday as a good Christian dog could desire.

But the glory of our meeting-house was its singers' seat--that empyrean of those who rejoiced in the divine, mysterious art of fa-sol-la-ing, who, by a distinguishing grace and privilege, could "raise and fall" the cabalistical eighth notes, and move serene through the enchanted region of flats, sharps, thirds, fifths, and octaves.

There they sat in the gallery that lined three sides of the house, treble, counter, tenor, and bass, each with its appropriate leaders and supporters; there were generally seated the bloom of our young people; sparkling, modest, and blushing girls on one side, with their ribbons and finery, making the place where they sat as blooming and lively as a flower garden, and fiery, forward, confident young men on the other. In spite of its being a meeting-house, we could not swear that glances were never given and returned, and that there was not often as much of an approach to flirtation as the distance and the sobriety of the place would admit. Certain it was, that there was no place where our village coquettes attracted half so many eyes or led astray half so many hearts.

But I have been talking of singers all this time, and neglected to mention the Magnus Apollo of the whole concern, the redoubtable chorister, who occupied the seat of honor in the midst of the middle gallery, and exactly opposite to the minister. Certain it is that the good man, if he were alive, would never believe it; for no person ever more magnified his office, or had a more thorough belief in his own greatness and supremacy, than Zedekiah Morse. Methinks I can see him now as he appeared to my eyes on that first Sunday, when he shot up from behind the gallery, as if he had been sent up by a spring. He was a little man, whose fiery red hair, brushed straight upon the top of his head, had an appearance as vigorous and lively as real flame; and this, added to the ardor and determination of all his motions, had obtained for him the surname of the "Burning Bush." He seemed possessed with the very soul of song; and from the moment he began to sing, looked alive all over, till it seemed to me that his whole body would follow his hair upwards, fairly rapt away by the power of harmony. With what an air did he sound the important fa-sol-la in the ears of the waiting gallery, who stood with open mouths ready to seize their pitch, preparatory to their general _set to_! How did his ascending and descending arm astonish the zephyrs when once he laid himself out to the important work of beating time! How did his little head whisk from side to side, as now he beat and roared towards the ladies on his right, and now towards the gentlemen on his left! It used to seem to my astonished vision as if his form grew taller, his arm longer, his hair redder, and his little green eyes brighter, with every stave; and particularly when he perceived any falling off of time or discrepancy in pitch; with what redoubled vigor would he thump the gallery and roar at the delinquent quarter, till every mother's son and daughter of them skipped and scrambled into the right place again!

Oh, it was a fine thing to see the vigor and discipline with which he managed the business; so that if, on a hot, drowsy Sunday, any part of the choir hung back or sung sleepily on the first part of a verse, they were obliged to bestir themselves in good earnest, and sing three times as fast, in order to get through with the others. 'Kiah Morse was no advocate for your dozy, drawling singing, that one may do at leisure, between sleeping and waking, I assure you; indeed, he got entirely out of the graces of Deacon Dundas and one or two other portly, leisurely old gentlemen below, who had been used to throw back their heads, shut up their eyes, and take the comfort of the psalm, by prolonging indefinitely all the notes. The first Sunday after 'Kiah took the music in hand, the old deacon really rubbed his eyes and looked about him, for the psalm was sung off before he was ready to get his mouth opened, and he really looked upon it as a most irreverent piece of business.

But the glory of 'Kiah's art consisted in the execution of those good old billowy compositions called fuguing tunes, where the four parts that compose the choir take up the song, and go racing around one after another, each singing a different set of words, till, at length, by some inexplicable magic, they all come together again, and sail smoothly out into a rolling sea of song. I remember the wonder with which I used to look from side to side when treble, tenor, counter, and bass were thus roaring and foaming,--and it verily seemed to me as if the psalm was going to pieces among the breakers,--and the delighted astonishment with which I found that each particular verse did emerge whole and uninjured from the storm.

But alas for the wonders of that old meeting-house, how they are passed away! Even the venerable building itself has been pulled down, and its fragments scattered; yet still I retain enough of my childish feelings to wonder whether any little boy was gratified by the possession of those painted tulips and grapevines, which my childish eye used to covet, and about the obtaining of which, in case the house should ever be pulled down, I devised so many schemes during the long sermons and services of summer days. I have visited the spot where it stood, but the modern, fair-looking building that stands in its room bears no trace of it; and of the various familiar faces that used to be seen inside not one remains. Verily, I must be growing old; and as old people are apt to spin long stories, I check myself, and lay down my pen.

LITTLE EDWARD

Were any of you born in New England, in the good old catechising, church-going, school-going, orderly times? If so, you may have seen my Uncle Abel; the most perpendicular, rectangular, upright, downright good man that ever labored six days and rested on the seventh.

You remember his hard, weather-beaten countenance, where every line seemed drawn with "a pen of iron and the point of a diamond;" his considerate gray eyes, that moved over objects as if it were not best to be in a hurry about seeing; the circumspect opening and shutting of the mouth; his down-sitting and up-rising, all performed with conviction aforethought--in short, the whole ordering of his life and conversation, which was, according to the tenor of the military order, "to the right about face--forward, march!"

Now, if you supposed, from all this triangularism of exterior, that this good man had nothing kindly within, you were much mistaken. You often find the greenest grass under a snowdrift; and though my uncle's mind was not exactly of the flower garden kind, still there was an abundance of wholesome and kindly vegetation there.

It is true, he seldom laughed, and never joked himself; but no man had a more serious and weighty conviction of what a good joke was in another; and when some exceeding witticism was dispensed in his presence, you might see Uncle Abel's face slowly relax into an expression of solemn satisfaction, and he would look at the author with a sort of quiet wonder, as if it was past his comprehension how such a thing could ever come into a man's head.

Uncle Abel, too, had some relish for the fine arts; in proof of which, I might adduce the pleasure with which he gazed at the plates in his family Bible, the likeness whereof is neither in heaven, nor on earth, nor under the earth. And he was also such an eminent musician, that he could go through the singing-book at one sitting without the least fatigue, beating time like a windmill all the way.

He had, too, a liberal hand, though his liberality was all by the rule of three. He did by his neighbor exactly as he would be done by. He loved some things in this world very sincerely; he loved his God much, but he honored and feared him more. He was exact with others; he was more exact with himself, and he expected his God to be more exact still.

Everything in Uncle Abel's house was in the same time, place, manner, and form, from year's end to year's end. There was old Master Bose, a dog after my uncle's own heart, who always walked as if he was studying the multiplication table. There was the old clock, forever ticking in the kitchen corner, with a picture on its face of the sun, forever setting behind a perpendicular row of poplar-trees. There was the never failing supply of red peppers and onions hanging over the chimney. There, too, were the yearly hollyhocks and morning-glories blooming about the windows. There was the "best room," with its sanded floor, the cupboard in one corner with its glass doors, the ever green asparagus bushes in the chimney, and there was the stand with the Bible and almanac on it in another corner. There, too, was Aunt Betsey, who never looked any older, because she always looked as old as she could; who always dried her catnip and wormwood the last of September, and began to clean house the first of May. In short, this was the land of continuance. Old Time never took it into his head to practice either addition, or subtraction, or multiplication on its sum total.

This Aunt Betsey aforenamed was the neatest and most efficient piece of human machinery that ever operated in forty places at once. She was always everywhere, predominating over and seeing to everything; and though my uncle had been twice married, Aunt Betsey's rule and authority had never been broken. She reigned over his wives when living, and reigned after them when dead, and so seemed likely to reign on to the end of the chapter. But my uncle's latest wife left Aunt Betsey a much less tractable subject than ever before had fallen to her lot. Little Edward was the child of my uncle's old age, and a brighter, merrier little blossom never grew on the verge of an avalanche. He had been committed to the nursing of his grandmamma till he had arrived at the age of _in_discretion, and then my old uncle's heart so yearned for him that he was sent for to come home.

His introduction into the family excited a terrible sensation. Never was there such a contemner of dignities, such a violator of high places and sanctities, as this very Master Edward. It was all in vain to try to teach him decorum. He was the most outrageously merry elf that ever shook a head of curls, and it was all the same to him whether it was "Sabba' day" or any other day. He laughed and frolicked with everybody and everything that came in his way, not even excepting his solemn old father; and when you saw him, with his fair arms around the old man's neck, and his bright blue eyes and blooming cheek peering out beside the bleak face of Uncle Abel, you might fancy you saw spring caressing winter. Uncle Abel's metaphysics were sorely puzzled by this sparkling, dancing compound of spirit and matter; nor could he devise any method of bringing it into any reasonable shape, for he did mischief with an energy and perseverance that was truly astonishing. Once he scoured the floor with Aunt Betsey's very Scotch snuff; once he washed up the hearth with Uncle Abel's most immaculate clothes-brush; and once he was found trying to make Bose wear his father's spectacles. In short, there was no use, except the right one, to which he did not put everything that came in his way.

But Uncle Abel was most of all puzzled to know what to do with him on the Sabbath, for on that day Master Edward seemed to exert himself to be particularly diligent and entertaining.

"Edward! Edward must not play Sunday!" his father would call out; and then Edward would hold up his curly head, and look as grave as the Catechism; but in three minutes you would see "pussy" scampering through the "best room," with Edward at her heels, to the entire discomposure of all devotion in Aunt Betsey and all others in authority.

At length my uncle came to the conclusion that "it wasn't in natur' to teach him any better," and that "he could no more keep Sunday than the brook down in the lot." My poor uncle! he did not know what was the matter with his heart, but certain it was, he lost all faculty of scolding when little Edward was in the case, and he would rub his spectacles a quarter of an hour longer than common when Aunt Betsey was detailing his witticisms and clever doings.

In process of time our hero had compassed his third year and arrived at the dignity of going to school. He went illustriously through the spelling-book, and then attacked the Catechism; went from "man's chief end" to the "requirin's and forbiddin's" in a fortnight, and at last came home inordinately merry, to tell his father that he had got to "Amen." After this, he made a regular business of saying over the whole every Sunday evening, standing with his hands folded in front and his checked apron folded down, occasionally glancing round to see if pussy gave proper attention. And, being of a practically benevolent turn of mind, he made several commendable efforts to teach Bose the Catechism, in which he succeeded as well as might be expected. In short, without further detail, Master Edward bade fair to become a literary wonder.

But alas for poor little Edward! his merry dance was soon over. A day came when he sickened. Aunt Betsey tried her whole herbarium, but in vain: he grew rapidly worse and worse. His father sickened in heart, but said nothing; he only stayed by his bedside day and night, trying all means to save, with affecting pertinacity.

"Can't you think of anything more, doctor?" said he to the physician, when all had been tried in vain.

"Nothing," answered the physician.

A momentary convulsion passed over my uncle's face. "The will of the Lord be done," said he, almost with a groan of anguish.

Just at that moment a ray of the setting sun pierced the checked curtains, and gleamed like an angel's smile across the face of the little sufferer. He woke from troubled sleep.

"Oh, dear! I am so sick!" he gasped feebly. His father raised him in his arms; he breathed easier, and looked up with a grateful smile. Just then his old playmate, the cat, crossed the room. "There goes pussy," said he; "oh, dear! I shall never play any more!"

At that moment a deadly change passed over his face. He looked up in his father's face with an imploring expression, and put out his hand as if for help. There was one moment of agony, and then the sweet features all settled into a smile of peace, and "mortality was swallowed up of life."

My uncle laid him down, and looked one moment at his beautiful face. It was too much for his principles, too much for his consistency, and "he lifted up his voice and wept."

The next morning was the Sabbath,--the funeral day,--and it rose with "breath all incense and with cheek all bloom." Uncle Abel was as calm and collected as ever; but in his face there was a sorrow-stricken appearance touching to behold. I remember him at family prayers, as he bent over the great Bible and began the psalm, "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations." Apparently he was touched by the melancholy splendor of the poetry, for after reading a few verses he stopped. There was a dead silence, interrupted only by the tick of the clock. He cleared his voice repeatedly, and tried to go on, but in vain. He closed the book, and kneeled down to prayer. The energy of sorrow broke through his usual formal reverence, and his language flowed forth with a deep and sorrowful pathos which I shall never forget. The God so much reverenced, so much feared, seemed to draw near to him as a friend and comforter, his refuge and strength, "a very present help in time of trouble."

My uncle rose, and I saw him walk to the room of the departed one. He uncovered the face. It was set with the seal of death; but oh, how surpassingly lovely! The brilliancy of life was gone, but that pure, transparent face was touched with a mysterious, triumphant brightness, which seemed like the dawning of heaven.

My uncle looked long and earnestly. He felt the beauty of what he gazed on; his heart was softened, but he had no words for his feelings. He left the room unconsciously, and stood in the front door. The morning was bright, the bells were ringing for church, the birds were singing merrily, and the pet squirrel of little Edward was frolicking about the door. My uncle watched him as he ran first up one tree, and then down and up another, and then over the fence, whisking his brush and chattering just as if nothing was the matter.

With a deep sigh Uncle Abel broke forth, "How happy that cretur' is! Well, the Lord's will be done."

That day the dust was committed to dust, amid the lamentations of all who had known little Edward. Years have passed since then, and all that is mortal of my uncle has long since been gathered to his fathers; but his just and upright spirit has entered the glorious liberty of the sons of God. Yes, the good man may have had opinions which the philosophical scorn, weaknesses at which the thoughtless smile; but death shall change him into all that is enlightened, wise, and refined, for he shall awake in "His" likeness, and "be satisfied."

CONVERSATION ON CONVERSATION

"For every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment."

"A very solemn sermon," said Miss B., shaking her head impressively, as she sat down to table on Sunday noon; then giving a deep sigh, she added, "I am afraid that if an account is to be rendered for all our idle words, some people will have a great deal to answer for."

"Why, Cousin Anna," replied a sprightly young lady opposite, "what do you mean by _idle words_?"

"All words that have not a strictly useful tendency, Helen," replied Miss B.

"I don't know what is to become of me, then," answered Helen, "for I never can think of anything useful to say. I sit and try sometimes, but it always stops my talking. I don't think anything in the world is so doleful as a set of persons sitting round, all trying to say something useful, like a parcel of old clocks ticking at each other. I think one might as well take the vow of entire silence, like the monks of La Trappe."

"It is probable," said Miss B., "that a greater part of our ordinary conversation had better be dispensed with. 'In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin.' For my own part, my conscience often reproaches me with the sins of my tongue."

"I'm sure you don't sin much that way, I must say," said Helen; "but, cousin, I really think it is a freezing business sitting still and reflecting all the time when friends are together; and, after all, I can't bring myself to feel as if it were wrong to talk and chatter away a good part of the time, just for the sake of talking. For instance, if a friend comes in of a morning to make a call, I talk about the weather, my roses, my canary-birds, or anything that comes uppermost."

"And about lace, and bonnet patterns, and the last fashions," added Miss B. sarcastically.

"Well, supposing we do; where's the harm?"

"Where's the good?" said Miss B.

"The good! why, it passes time agreeably, and makes us feel kindly towards each other."

"I think, Helen," said Miss B., "if you had a higher view of Christian responsibility, you would not be satisfied with merely passing time agreeably, or exciting agreeable feelings in others. Does not the very text we are speaking of show that we have an account to give in the day of judgment for all this trifling, useless conversation?"

"I don't know what that text does mean," replied Helen, looking seriously; "but if it means as you say, I think it is a very hard, strait rule."

"Well," replied Miss B., "is not duty always hard and strait? 'Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way,' you know."

Helen sighed.

"What do you think of this, Uncle C.?" she said, after some pause. The uncle of the two young ladies had been listening thus far in silence.

"I think," he replied, "that before people begin to discuss, they should be quite sure as to what they are talking about, and I am not exactly clear in this case. You say, Anna," said he, turning to Miss B., "that all conversation is idle which has not a directly useful tendency. Now, what do you mean by that? Are we never to say anything that has not for its direct and specific object the benefit of others or of ourselves?"

"Yes," replied Miss B., "I suppose not."

"Well, then, when I say, 'Good-morning, sir; 'tis a pleasant day,' I have no such object. Are these, then, idle words?"

"Why, no, not exactly," replied Miss B.; "in some cases it is necessary to say something, so as not to appear rude."

"Very well," replied her uncle. "You admit, then, that some things, which are not instructive in themselves considered, are to be said to keep up the intercourse of society?"

"Certainly; some things," said Miss B.

"Well, now, in the case mentioned by Helen, when two or three people with whom you are in different degrees of intimacy call upon you, I think she is perfectly right, as she said, in talking of roses, and canary-birds, and even of bonnet patterns, and lace, or anything of the kind, for the sake of making conversation. It amounts to the same thing as 'good-morning,' and 'good-evening,' and the other courtesies of society. This sort of small talk has nothing instructive in it, and yet it may be useful in its place. It makes people comfortable and easy, promotes kind and social feelings; and making people comfortable by any innocent means is certainly not a thing to be despised."

"But is there not great danger of becoming light and trifling if one allows this?" said Miss B. doubtfully.

"To be sure; there is always danger of running every innocent thing to excess. One might eat to excess, or drink to excess; yet eating and drinking are both useful in their way. Now, our lively young friend Helen, here, might perhaps be in some temptation of this sort; but as for you, Anna, I think you in more danger of another extreme."

"And what is that?"

"Of overstraining your mind by endeavoring to keep up a constant, fixed state of seriousness and solemnity, and not allowing yourself the relaxation necessary to preserve its healthy tone. In order to be healthy, every mind must have variety and amusement; and if you would sit down at least one hour a day, and join your friends in some amusing conversation, and indulge in a good laugh, I think, my dear, that you would not only be a happier person, but a better Christian."

"My dear uncle," said Miss B., "this is the very thing that I have been most on my guard against; I can never tell stories, or laugh and joke, without feeling condemned for it afterwards."

"But, my dear, you must do the thing in the testimony of a good conscience before you can do it to any purpose. You must make up your mind that cheerful and entertaining conversation--conversation whose first object is to amuse--is useful conversation in its place, and then your conscience will not be injured by joining in it."

"But what good does it do, uncle?"

"Do you not often complain of coldness and deadness in your religious feelings? of lifelessness and want of interest?"

"Yes, uncle."

"Well, this coldness and lifelessness is the result of forcing your mind to one set of thoughts and feelings. You become worn out--your feelings exhausted--deadness and depression ensue. Now, turn your mind off from these subjects--divert it by a cheerful and animated conversation, and you will find, after a while, that it will return to them with new life and energy."

"But are not foolish talking and jesting expressly forbidden?"

"That text, if you will look at the connections, does not forbid jesting in the abstract; but jesting on immodest subjects--which are often designated in the New Testament by the phraseology there employed. I should give the sense of it--neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor indelicate jests. The kind of sprightly and amusing conversation to which I referred, I should not denominate foolish, by any means, at proper times and places."

"Yet people often speak of gayety as inconsistent in Christians--even worldly people," said Miss B.

"Yes, because, in the first place, they often have wrong ideas as to what Christianity requires in this respect, and suppose Christians to be violating their own principles in indulging in it. In the second place, there are some, especially among young people, who never talk in any other way--with whom this kind of conversation is not an amusement, but a habit--giving the impression that they never think seriously at all. But I think, that if persons are really possessed by the tender, affectionate, benevolent spirit of Christianity--if they regulate their temper and their tongue by it, and in all their actions show an evident effort to conform to its precepts; they will not do harm by occasionally indulging in sprightly and amusing conversation--they will not make the impression that they are not sincerely Christians."

"Besides," said Helen, "are not people sometimes repelled from religion by a want of cheerfulness in its professors?"

"Certainly," replied her uncle, "and the difference is just this: if persons are habitually trifling and thoughtless, it is thought that they have _no_ religion; if they are ascetic and gloomy it is attributed to their religion; and you know what Miss E. Smith says--that 'to be good and disagreeable is high treason against virtue.' The more sincerely and earnestly religious a person is, the more important it is that he should be agreeable."

"But, uncle," said Helen, "what does that text mean that we began with? What are idle words?"

"My dear, if you will turn to the place where the passage is (Matt. xii.) and read the whole page, you will see the meaning of it. Christ was not reproving anybody for trifling conversation at the time; but for a very serious slander. The Pharisees, in their bitterness, accused him of being in league with evil spirits. It seems, by what follows, that this was a charge which involved an unpardonable sin. They were not, indeed, conscious of its full guilt,--they said it merely from the impulse of excited and envious feeling,--but he warns them that in the day of judgment God will hold them accountable for the full consequences of all such language, however little they may have thought of it at the time of uttering it. The sense of the passage I take to be, 'God will hold you responsible in the day of judgment for the consequences of all you have said in your most idle and thoughtless moments.'"

"For example," said Helen, "if one makes unguarded and unfounded assertions about the Bible, which excite doubt and prejudice."

"There are many instances," said her uncle, "that are quite in point. Suppose in conversation, either under the influence of envy or ill will, or merely from love of talking, you make remarks and statements about another person which may be true or may not,--you do not stop to inquire,--your unguarded words set reports in motion, and unhappiness, and hard feeling, and loss of character are the result. You spoke idly, it is true, but nevertheless you are held responsible by God for all the consequences of your words. So professors of religion often make unguarded remarks about each other, which lead observers to doubt the truth of all religion; and they are responsible for every such doubt they excite. Parents and guardians often allow themselves to speak of the faults and weaknesses of their ministers in the presence of children and younger people--they do it thoughtlessly--but in so doing they destroy an influence which might otherwise have saved the souls of their children; they are responsible for it. People of cultivated minds and fastidious taste often allow themselves to come home from church, and criticise a sermon, and unfold all its weak points in the presence of others on whom it may have made a very serious impression. While the critic is holding up the bad arrangement, and setting in a ludicrous point of view the lame figures, perhaps the servant behind his chair, who was almost persuaded to be a Christian by that very discourse, gives up his purposes, in losing his respect for the sermon; this was thoughtless--but the evil is done, and the man who did it is responsible for it."

"I think," said Helen, "that a great deal of evil is done to children in this way, by our not thinking of what we are saying."

"It seems to me," said Miss B., "that this view of the subject will reduce us to silence almost as much as the other. How is one ever to estimate the consequences of their words?--people are affected in so many different ways by the same thing."

"I suppose," said her uncle, "we are only responsible for such results as by carefulness and reflection we might have foreseen. It is not for ill-judged words, but for idle words, that we are to be judged--words uttered without any consideration at all, and producing bad results. If a person really anxious to do right misjudges as to the probable effect of what he is about to say on others, it is quite another thing."

"But, uncle, will not such carefulness destroy all freedom in conversation?" said Helen.

"If you are talking with a beloved friend, Helen, do you not use an instinctive care to avoid all that might pain that friend?"

"Certainly."

"And do you find this effort a restraint on your enjoyment?"

"Certainly not."

"And you, from your own feelings, avoid what is indelicate and impure in conversation, and yet feel it no restraint?"

"Certainly."

"Well, I suppose the object of Christian effort should be so to realize the character of our Saviour, and conform our tastes and sympathies to his, that we shall instinctively avoid all in our conversation that would be displeasing to him. A person habitually indulging jealous, angry, or revengeful feeling, a person habitually worldly in his spirit, a person allowing himself in skeptical and unsettled habits of thought, _cannot_ talk without doing harm. This is our Saviour's account of the matter in the verses immediately before the passage we were speaking of--'How _can_ ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth evil things.' The highest flow of animal spirits would never hurry a pure-minded person to say anything indelicate or gross; and in the same manner, if a person is habitually Christian in all his habits of thought and feeling, he will be able without irksome watchfulness to avoid what may be injurious even in the most unrestrained conversation."

HOW DO WE KNOW

It was a splendid room. Rich curtains swept down to the floor in graceful folds, half excluding the light, and shedding it in soft hues over the fine old paintings on the walls, and over the broad mirrors that reflect all that taste can accomplish by the hand of wealth. Books, the rarest and most costly, were around, in every form of gorgeous binding and gilding, and among them, glittering in ornament, lay a magnificent Bible--a Bible too beautiful in its appointments, too showy, too ornamental, ever to have been meant to be read--a Bible which every visitor should take up and exclaim, "What a beautiful edition! what superb bindings!" and then lay it down again.

And the master of the house was lounging on a sofa, looking over a late review--for he was a man of leisure, taste, and reading--but, then, as to reading the Bible!--that forms, we suppose, no part of the pretensions of a man of letters. The Bible--certainly he considered it a very respectable book--a fine specimen of ancient literature--an admirable book of moral precepts; but, then, as to its divine origin, he had not exactly made up his mind: some parts appeared strange and inconsistent to his reason--others were revolting to his taste: true, he had never studied it very attentively, yet such was his general impression about it; but, on the whole, he thought it well enough to keep an elegant copy of it on his drawing-room table.

So much for one picture. Now for another.

Come with us into this little dark alley, and up a flight of ruinous stairs. It is a bitter night, and the wind and snow might drive through the crevices of the poor room, were it not that careful hands have stopped them with paper or cloth. But for all this carefulness, the room is bitter cold--cold even with those few decaying brands on the hearth, which that sorrowful woman is trying to kindle with her breath. Do you see that pale, little, thin girl, with large, bright eyes, who is crouching so near her mother?--hark!--how she coughs. Now listen.

"Mary, my dear child," says the mother, "do keep that shawl close about you; you are cold, I know," and the woman shivers as she speaks.

"No, mother, not very," replies the child, again relapsing into that hollow, ominous cough. "I wish you wouldn't make me always wear your shawl when it is cold, mother."

"Dear child, you need it most. How you cough to-night!" replies the mother; "it really don't seem right for me to send you up that long, cold street; now your shoes have grown so poor, too; I must go myself after this."

"Oh, mother, you must stay with the baby--what if he should have one of those dreadful fits while you are gone! No, I can go very well; I have got used to the cold now."

"But, mother, I'm cold," says a little voice from the scanty bed in the corner; "mayn't I get up and come to the fire?"

"Dear child, it would not warm you; it is very cold here, and I can't make any more fire to-night."

"Why can't you, mother? There are four whole sticks of wood in the box; do put one on, and let's get warm once."

"No, my dear little Henry," says the mother soothingly, "that is all the wood mother has, and I haven't any money to get more."

And now wakens the sick baby in the cradle, and mother and daughter are both for some time busy in attempting to supply its little wants, and lulling it again to sleep.

And now look you well at that mother. Six months ago she had a husband, whose earnings procured for her both the necessaries and comforts of life; her children were clothed, fed, and schooled, without thoughts of hers. But husbandless, friendless, and alone in the heart of a great, busy city, with feeble health, and only the precarious resource of her needle, she has gone down from comfort to extreme poverty. Look at her now, as she is to-night. She knows full well that the pale, bright-eyed girl, whose hollow cough constantly rings in her ears, is far from well. She knows that cold, and hunger, and exposure of every kind, are daily and surely wearing away her life. And yet what can she do? Poor soul! how many times has she calculated all her little resources, to see if she could pay a doctor and get medicine for Mary--yet all in vain. She knows that timely medicine, ease, fresh air, and warmth might save her; but she knows that all these things are out of the question for her. She feels, too, as a mother would feel, when she sees her once rosy, happy little boy becoming pale, and anxious, and fretful; and even when he teases her most, she only stops her work a moment, and strokes his little thin cheeks, and thinks what a laughing, happy little fellow he once was, till she has not a heart to reprove him. And all this day she has toiled with a sick and fretful baby in her lap, and her little shivering, hungry boy at her side, whom Mary's patient artifices cannot always keep quiet; she has toiled over the last piece of work which she can procure from the shop, for the man has told her that after this he can furnish no more; and the little money that is to come from this is already portioned out in her own mind, and after that she has no human prospect of support.

But yet that woman's face is patient, quiet, firm. Nay, you may even see in her suffering eye something like peace. And whence comes it? I will tell you.

There is a Bible in that room, as well as in the rich man's apartment. Not splendidly bound, to be sure, but faithfully read--a plain, homely, much worn book.

Hearken now while she says to her children, "Listen to me, dear children, and I will read you something out of this book. 'Let not your heart be troubled; in my Father's house are many mansions.' So you see, my children, we shall not always live in this little, cold, dark room. Jesus Christ has promised to take us to a better home."

"Shall we be warm there all day?" says the little boy earnestly; "and shall we have enough to eat?"

"Yes, dear child," says the mother; "listen to what the Bible says: 'They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.'"

"I am glad of that," said little Mary, "for, mother, I never can bear to see you cry."

"But, mother," says little Henry, "won't God send us something to eat to-morrow?"

"See," says the mother, "what the Bible says: 'Seek ye not what ye shall eat, nor what ye shall drink, neither be of anxious mind. For your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.'"

"But, mother," says little Mary, "if God is our Father, and loves us, what does he let us be so poor for?"

"Nay," says the mother, "our dear Lord Jesus Christ was as poor as we are, and God certainly loved him."

"Was he, mother?"

"Yes, children; you remember how he said, 'The Son of man hath not where to lay his head.' And it tells us more than once that Jesus was hungry when there was none to give him food."

"Oh, mother, what should we do without the Bible?" says Mary.

Now, if the rich man, who had not yet made up his mind what to think of the Bible, should visit this poor woman, and ask her on what she grounded her belief of its truth, what could she answer? Could she give the arguments from miracles and prophecy? Could she account for all the changes which might have taken place in it through translators and copyists, and prove that we have a genuine and uncorrupted version? Not she! But how, then, does she know that it is true? How, say you? How does she know that she has warm life-blood in her heart? How does she know that there is such a thing as air and sunshine? She does not believe these things--she knows them; and in like manner, with a deep heart consciousness, she is certain that the words of her Bible are truth and life. Is it by reasoning that the frightened child, bewildered in the dark, knows its mother's voice? No! Nor is it only by reasoning that the forlorn and distressed human heart knows the voice of its Saviour, and is still.

HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH MAMMON

It was four o'clock in the afternoon of a dull winter day that Mr. H. sat in his counting-room. The sun had nearly gone down, and, in fact, it was already twilight beneath the shadows of the tall, dusky stores, and the close, crooked streets of that quarter of Boston. Hardly light enough struggled through the dusky panes of the counting-house for him to read the entries in a much-thumbed memorandum-book, which he held in his hand.

A small, thin boy, with a pale face and anxious expression, significant of delicacy of constitution and a too early acquaintance with want and sorrow, was standing by him, earnestly watching his motions.

"Ah, yes, my boy," said Mr. H., as he at last shut up the memorandum-book. "Yes, I've got the place now; I'm apt to be forgetful about these things; come, now, let's go. How is it? Haven't you brought the basket?"

"No, sir," said the boy timidly. "The grocer said he'd let mother have a quarter for it, and she thought she'd sell it."

"That's bad," said Mr. H., as he went on, tying his throat with a long comforter of some yards in extent; and as he continued this operation he abstractedly repeated, "That's bad, that's bad," till the poor little boy looked quite dismayed, and began to think that somehow his mother had been dreadfully out of the way.

"She didn't want to send for help so long as she had anything she could sell," said the little boy in a deprecating tone.

"Oh yes, quite right," said Mr. H., taking from a pigeonhole in the desk a large pocketbook, and beginning to turn it over; and, as before, abstractedly repeating, "Quite right, quite right!" till the little boy became reassured, and began to think, although he didn't know why, that his mother had done something quite meritorious.

"Well," said Mr. H., after he had taken several bills from the pocketbook and transferred them to a wallet which he put into his pocket, "now we're ready, my boy." But first he stopped to lock up his desk, and then he said abstractedly to himself, "I wonder if I hadn't better take a few tracts." Now, it is to be confessed that this Mr. H., whom we have introduced to our reader, was, in his way, quite an oddity. He had a number of singular little _penchants_ and peculiarities quite his own, such as a passion for poking about among dark alleys, at all sorts of seasonable and unseasonable hours; fishing out troops of dirty, neglected children, and fussing about generally in the community till he could get them into schools or otherwise provided for. He always had in his pocketbook a note of some dozen poor widows who wanted tea, sugar, candles, or other things such as poor widows always will be wanting. And then he had a most extraordinary talent for finding out all the sick strangers that lay in out-of-the-way upper rooms in hotels, who, everybody knows, have no business to get sick in such places, unless they have money enough to pay their expenses, which they never do.

Besides this, all Mr. H.'s kinsmen and cousins, to the third, fourth, and fortieth remove, were always writing him letters, which, among other pleasing items, generally contained the intelligence that a few hundred dollars were just then exceedingly necessary to save them from utter ruin, and they knew of nobody else to whom to look for it.

And then Mr. H. was up to his throat in subscriptions to every charitable society that ever was made or imagined; had a hand in building all the churches within a hundred miles; occasionally gave four or five thousand dollars to a college; offered to be one of six to raise ten thousand dollars for some benevolent purpose, and when four of the six backed out, quietly paid the balance himself, and said no more about it. Another of his innocent fancies was to keep always about him any quantity of tracts and good books, little and big, for children and grown-up people, which he generally diffused in a kind of gentle shower about him wherever he moved.

So great was his monomania for benevolence that it could not at all confine itself to the streets of Boston, the circle of his relatives, or even the United States of America. Mr. H. was fully posted up in the affairs of India, Burmah, China, and all those odd, out-of-the-way places, which no sensible man ever thinks of with any interest, unless he can make some money there; and money, it is to be confessed, Mr. H. didn't make there, though he spent an abundance. For getting up printing-presses in Ceylon for Chinese type, for boxes of clothing and what-not to be sent to the Sandwich Islands, for schoolbooks for the Greeks, and all other nonsense of that sort, Mr. H. was without a parallel. No wonder his rich brother merchants sometimes thought him something of a bore, since, his heart being full of all these matters, he was rather apt to talk about them, and sometimes to endeavor to draw them into fellowship, to an extent that was not to be thought of.

So it came to pass often, that though Mr. H. was a thriving business man, with some ten thousand a year, he often wore a pretty threadbare coat, the seams whereof would be trimmed with lines of white; and he would sometimes need several pretty plain hints on the subject of a new hat before he would think he could afford one. Now, it is to be confessed the world is not always grateful to those who thus devote themselves to its interests; and Mr. H. had as much occasion to know this as any other man. People got so used to his giving, that his bounty became as common and as necessary as that of a higher Benefactor, "who maketh his sun to rise upon the evil and the good, and sendeth rain upon the just and the unjust;" and so it came to pass that people took them, as they do the sunshine and the rain, quite as matters of course, not thinking much about them when they came, but particularly apt to scold when they did not come.

But Mr. H. never cared for that. He did not give for gratitude; he did not give for thanks, nor to have his name published in the papers as one of six who had given fifty thousand to do so and so; but he gave because it was in him to give, and we all know that it is an old rule in medicine, as well as morals, that what is in a man must be brought out. Then, again, he had heard it reported that there had been One of distinguished authority who had expressed the opinion that it was "more blessed to give than to receive," and he very much believed it--believed it because the One who said it must have known, since for man's sake he once gave away _all_.

And so, when some thriftless, distant relation, whose debts he had paid a dozen times over, gave him an overhauling on the subject of liberality, and seemed inclined to take him by the throat for further charity, he calmed himself down by a chapter or two from the New Testament and half a dozen hymns, and then sent him a good, brotherly letter of admonition and counsel, with a bank-note to enforce it; and when some querulous old woman, who had had a tenement of him rent free for three or four years, sent him word that if he didn't send and mend the water-pipes she would move right out, he sent and mended them. People said that he was foolish, and that it didn't do any good to do for ungrateful people; but Mr. H. knew that it did _him_ good. He loved to do it, and he thought also on some words that ran to this effect: "Do good and lend, hoping for nothing again." He literally hoped for nothing again in the way of reward, either in this world or in heaven, beyond the present pleasure of the deed; for he had abundant occasion to see how favors are forgotten in this world; and as for another, he had in his own soul a standard of benevolence so high, so pure, so ethereal, that but One of mortal birth ever reached it. He felt that, do what he might, he fell ever so far below the life of that spotless One--that his crown in heaven must come to him at last, not as a reward, but as a free, eternal gift.

But all this while our friend and his little companion have been pattering along the wet streets, in the rain and sleet of a bitter cold evening, till they stopped before a grocery. Here a large cross-handled basket was first bought, and then filled with sundry packages of tea, sugar, candles, soap, starch, and various other matters; a barrel of flour was ordered to be sent after him on a dray. Mr. H. next stopped at a dry goods store and bought a pair of blankets, with which he loaded down the boy, who was happy enough to be so loaded; and then, turning gradually from the more frequented streets, the two were soon lost to view in one of the dimmest alleys of the city.

The cheerful fire was blazing in his parlor, as, returned from his long, wet walk, he was sitting by it with his feet comfortably incased in slippers. The astral lamp was burning brightly on the centre-table, and a group of children were around it, studying their lessons.

"Papa," said a little boy, "what does this verse mean? It's in my Sunday-school lesson. 'Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.'"

"You ought to have asked your teacher, my son."

"But he said he didn't know exactly what it meant. He wanted me to look this week and see if I could find out."

Mr. H.'s standing resource in all exegetical difficulties was Dr. Scott's Family Bible. Therefore he now got up, and putting on his spectacles, walked to the glass bookcase, and took down a volume of that worthy commentator, and opening it, read aloud the whole exposition of the passage, together with the practical reflections upon it; and by the time he had done, he found his young auditor fast asleep in his chair.

"Mother," said he, "this child plays too hard. He can't keep his eyes open evenings. It's time he was in bed."

"I wasn't asleep, pa," said Master Henry, starting up with that air of injured innocence with which gentlemen of his age generally treat an imputation of this kind.

"Then can you tell me now what the passage means that I have been reading to you?"

"There's so much of it," said Henry hopelessly, "I wish you'd just tell me in short order, father."

"Oh, read it for yourself," said Mr. H., as he pushed the book towards the boy, for it was to be confessed that he perceived at this moment that he had not himself received any particularly luminous impression, though of course he thought it was owing to his own want of comprehension.

Mr. H. leaned back in his rocking-chair, and on his own private account began to speculate a little as to what he really should think the verse might mean, supposing he were at all competent to decide upon it. "'Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness,'" says he: "that's money, very clearly. How am I to make friends with it or of it? Receive me into everlasting habitations: that's a singular kind of expression. I wonder what it means. Dr. Scott makes some very good remarks about it--but somehow I'm not exactly clear." It must be remarked that this was not an uncommon result of Mr. H.'s critical investigations in this quarter.

Well, thoughts will wander; and as he lay with his head on the back of his rocking-chair, and his eyes fixed on the flickering blaze of the coal, visions of his wet tramp in the city, and of the lonely garret he had been visiting, and of the poor woman with the pale, discouraged face, to whom he had carried warmth and comfort, all blended themselves together. He felt, too, a little indefinite creeping chill, and some uneasy sensations in his head like a commencing cold, for he was not a strong man, and it is probable his long, wet walk was likely to cause him some inconvenience in this way. At last he was fast asleep, nodding in his chair.

He dreamed that he was very sick in bed, that the doctor came and went, and that he grew sicker and sicker. He was going to die. He saw his wife sitting weeping by his pillow--his children standing by with pale and frightened faces; all things in his room began to swim, and waver, and fade, and voices that called his name, and sobs and lamentations that rose around him, seemed far off and distant in his ear. "Oh, eternity, eternity! I am going--I am going," he thought; and in that hour, strange to tell, not one of all his good deeds seemed good enough to lean on--all bore some taint or tinge, to his purified eye, of mortal selfishness, and seemed unholy before the All Pure. "I am going," he thought; "there is no time to stay, no time to alter, to balance accounts; and I know not what I am, but I know, O Jesus, what thou art. I have trusted in thee, and shall never be confounded;" and with that last breath of prayer earth was past.

A soft and solemn breathing, as of music, awakened him. As an infant child not yet fully awake hears the holy warblings of his mother's hymn, and smiles half conscious, so the heaven-born became aware of sweet voices and loving faces around him ere yet he fully woke to the new immortal Life.

"Ah, he has come at last. How long we have waited for him! Here he is among us. Now forever welcome! welcome!" said the voices.

Who shall speak the joy of that latest birth, the birth from death to life! the sweet, calm, inbreathing consciousness of purity and rest, the certainty that all sin, all weakness and error, are at last gone forever; the deep, immortal rapture of repose--felt to be but begun--never to end!

So the eyes of the heaven-born opened on the new heaven and the new earth, and wondered at the crowd of loving faces that thronged about him. Fair, godlike forms of beauty, such as earth never knew, pressed round him with blessings, thanks, and welcome.

The man spoke not, but he wondered in his heart who they were, and whence it came that they knew him; and as soon as the inquiry formed itself in his soul, it was read at once by his heavenly friends. "I," said one bright spirit, "was a poor boy whom you found in the streets: you sought me out, you sent me to school, you watched over me, and led me to the house of God; and now here I am." "And we," said other voices, "are other neglected children whom you redeemed; we also thank you." "And I," said another, "was a lost, helpless girl: sold to sin and shame, nobody thought I could be saved; everybody passed me by till you came. You built a home, a refuge for such poor wretches as I, and there I and many like me heard of Jesus; and here we are." "And I," said another, "was once a clerk in your store. I came to the city innocent, but I was betrayed by the tempter. I forgot my mother, and my mother's God. I went to the gaming-table and the theatre, and at last I robbed your drawer. You might have justly cast me off; but you bore with me, you watched over me, you saved me. I am here through you this day." "And I," said another, "was a poor slave girl--doomed to be sold on the auction-block to a life of infamy, and the ruin of soul and body. Had you not been willing to give so largely for my ransom, no one had thought to buy me. You stimulated others to give, and I was redeemed. I lived a Christian mother to bring my children up for Christ--they are all here with me to bless you this day, and their children on earth, and their children's children are growing up to bless you." "And I," said another, "was an unbeliever. In the pride of my intellect, I thought I could demonstrate the absurdity of Christianity. I thought I could answer the argument from miracles and prophecy; but your patient, self-denying life was an argument I never could answer. When I saw you spending all your time and all your money in efforts for your fellow men, undiscouraged by ingratitude, and careless of praise, then I thought, 'There is something divine in that man's life,' and that thought brought me here."

The man looked around on the gathering congregation, and he saw that there was no one whom he had drawn heavenward that had not also drawn thither myriads of others. In his lifetime he had been scattering seeds of good around from hour to hour, almost unconsciously; and now he saw every seed springing up into a widening forest of immortal beauty and glory. It seemed to him that there was to be no end of the numbers that flocked to claim him as their long-expected soul friend. His heart was full, and his face became as that of an angel as he looked up to One who seemed nearer than all, and said, "This is thy love for me, unworthy, O Jesus. Of thee, and to thee, and through thee are all things. Amen."

Amen! as with chorus of many waters and mighty thunderings the sound swept onward, and died far off in chiming echoes among the distant stars, and the man awoke.

THE SABBATH

SKETCHES FROM A NOTE-BOOK OF AN ELDERLY GENTLEMAN

The Puritan Sabbath--is there such a thing existing now, or has it gone with the things that were, to be looked at as a curiosity in the museum of the past? Can any one, in memory, take himself back to the unbroken stillness of that day, and recall the sense of religious awe which seemed to brood in the very atmosphere, checking the merry laugh of childhood, and chaining in unwonted stillness the tongue of volatile youth, and imparting even to the sunshine of heaven, and the unconscious notes of animals, a tone of its own gravity and repose? If you cannot remember these things, go back with me to the verge of early boyhood, and live with me one of the Sabbaths that I have spent beneath the roof of my uncle, Phineas Fletcher.

Imagine the long sunny hours of a Saturday afternoon insensibly slipping away, as we youngsters are exploring the length and breadth of a trout stream, or chasing gray squirrels, or building mud milldams in the brook. The sun sinks lower and lower, but we still think it does not want half an hour to sundown. At last, he so evidently is really going down, that there is no room for skepticism or latitude of opinion on the subject; and with many a lingering regret, we began to put away our fish-hooks, and hang our hoops over our arm, preparatory to trudging homeward.

"Oh, Henry, don't you wish that Saturday afternoons lasted longer?" said little John to me.

"I do," says Cousin Bill, who was never the boy to mince matters in giving his sentiments; "and I wouldn't care if Sunday didn't come but once a year."

"Oh, Bill, that's wicked, I'm afraid," says little conscientious Susan, who, with her doll in hand, was coming home from a Saturday afternoon visit.

"Can't help it," says Bill, catching Susan's bag, and tossing it in the air; "I never did like to sit still, and that's why I hate Sundays."

"Hate Sundays! Oh, Bill! Why, Aunt Kezzy says heaven is an eternal Sabbath--only think of that!"

"Well, I know I must be pretty different from what I am now before I could sit still forever," said Bill in a lower and somewhat disconcerted tone, as if admitting the force of the consideration.

The rest of us began to look very grave, and to think that we must get to liking Sunday some time or other, or it would be a very bad thing for us. As we drew near the dwelling, the compact and businesslike form of Aunt Kezzy was seen emerging from the house to hasten our approach.

"How often have I told you, young ones, not to stay out after sundown on Saturday night? Don't you know it's the same as Sunday, you wicked children, you? Come right into the house, every one of you, and never let me hear of such a thing again."

This was Aunt Kezzy's regular exordium every Saturday night; for we children, being blinded, as she supposed, by natural depravity, always made strange mistakes in reckoning time on Saturday afternoons. After being duly suppered and scrubbed, we were enjoined to go to bed, and remember that to-morrow was Sunday, and that we must not laugh and play in the morning. With many a sorrowful look did Susan deposit her doll in the chest, and give one lingering glance at the patchwork she was piecing for dolly's bed, while William, John, and myself emptied our pockets of all superfluous fish-hooks, bits of twine, popguns, slices of potato, marbles, and all the various items of boy property, which, to keep us from temptation, were taken into Aunt Kezzy's safe-keeping over Sunday.

My Uncle Phineas was a man of great exactness, and Sunday was the centre of his whole worldly and religious system. Everything with regard to his worldly business was so arranged that by Saturday noon it seemed to come to a close of itself. All his accounts were looked over, his workmen paid, all borrowed things returned, and lent things sent after, and every tool and article belonging to the farm was returned to its own place at exactly such an hour every Saturday afternoon, and an hour before sundown every item of preparation, even to the blacking of his Sunday shoes and the brushing of his Sunday coat, was entirely concluded; and at the going down of the sun, the stillness of the Sabbath seemed to settle down over the whole dwelling.

And now it is Sunday morning; and though all without is fragrance, and motion, and beauty, the dewdrops are twinkling, butterflies fluttering, and merry birds caroling and racketing as if they never could sing loud or fast enough, yet within there is such a stillness that the tick of the tall mahogany clock is audible through the whole house, and the buzz of the blue flies, as they whiz along up and down the window-panes, is a distinct item of hearing. Look into the best front room, and you may see the upright form of my Uncle Phineas, in his immaculate Sunday clothes, with his Bible spread open on the little stand before him, and even a deeper than usual gravity settling down over his toil-worn features. Alongside, in well-brushed Sunday clothes, with clean faces and smooth hair, sat the whole of us younger people, each drawn up in a chair, with hat and handkerchief, ready for the first stroke of the bell, while Aunt Kezzy, all trimmed, and primmed, and made ready for meeting, sat reading her psalm-book, only looking up occasionally to give an additional jerk to some shirt-collar, or the fifteenth pull to Susan's frock, or to repress any straggling looks that might be wandering about, "beholding vanity."

A stranger, in glancing at Uncle Phineas as he sat intent on his Sunday reading, might have seen that the Sabbath was in his heart--there was no mistake about it. It was plain that he had put by all worldly thoughts when he shut up his account-book, and that his mind was as free from every earthly association as his Sunday coat was from dust. The slave of worldliness, who is driven, by perplexing business or adventurous speculation, through the hours of a half-kept Sabbath to the fatigues of another week, might envy the unbroken quiet, the sunny tranquillity, which hallowed the weekly rest of my uncle.

The Sabbath of the Puritan Christian was the golden day, and all its associations, and all its thoughts, words, and deeds, were so entirely distinct from the ordinary material of life, that it was to him a sort of weekly translation--a quitting of this world to sojourn a day in a better; and year after year, as each Sabbath set its seal on the completed labors of a week, the pilgrim felt that one more stage of his earthly journey was completed, and that he was one week nearer to his eternal rest. And as years, with their changes, came on, and the strong man grew old, and missed, one after another, familiar forms that had risen around his earlier years, the face of the Sabbath became like that of an old and tried friend, carrying him back to the scenes of his youth, and connecting him with scenes long gone by, restoring to him the dew and freshness of brighter and more buoyant days.

Viewed simply as an institution for a Christian and mature mind, nothing could be more perfect than the Puritan Sabbath: if it had any failing, it was in the want of adaptation to children, and to those not interested in its peculiar duties. If you had been in the dwelling of my uncle of a Sabbath morning, you must have found the unbroken stillness delightful; the calm and quiet must have soothed and disposed you for contemplation, and the evident appearance of single-hearted devotion to the duties of the day in the elder part of the family must have been a striking addition to the picture. But, then, if your eye had watched attentively the motions of us juveniles, you might have seen that what was so very invigorating to the disciplined Christian was a weariness to young flesh and bones. Then there was not, as now, the intellectual relaxation afforded by the Sunday-school, with its various forms of religious exercise, its thousand modes of interesting and useful information. Our whole stock in this line was the Bible and Primer, and these were our main dependence for whiling away the tedious hours between our early breakfast and the signal for meeting. How often was our invention stretched to find wherewithal to keep up our stock of excitement in a line with the duties of the day! For the first half hour, perhaps, a story in the Bible answered our purpose very well; but, having dispatched the history of Joseph, or the story of the ten plagues, we then took to the Primer: and then there was, first, the looking over the system of theological and ethical teaching, commencing, "In Adam's fall we sinnéd all," and extending through three or four pages of pictorial and poetic embellishment. Next was the death of John Rogers, who was burned at Smithfield; and for a while we could entertain ourselves with counting all his "nine children and one at the breast," as in the picture they stand in a regular row, like a pair of stairs. These being done, came miscellaneous exercises of our own invention, such as counting all the psalms in the psalm-book, backward and forward, to and from the Doxology, or numbering the books in the Bible, or some other such device as we deemed within the pale of religious employments. When all these failed, and it still wanted an hour of meeting time, we looked up at the ceiling, and down at the floor, and all around into every corner, to see what we could do next; and happy was he who could spy a pin gleaming in some distant crack, and forthwith muster an occasion for getting down to pick it up. Then there was the infallible recollection that we wanted a drink of water, as an excuse to get out to the well; or else we heard some strange noise among the chickens, and insisted that it was essential that we should see what was the matter; or else pussy would jump on to the table, when all of us would spring to drive her down; while there was a most assiduous watching of the clock to see when the first bell would ring. Happy was it for us, in the interim, if we did not begin to look at each other and make up faces, or slyly slip off and on our shoes, or some other incipient attempts at roguery, which would gradually so undermine our gravity that there would be some sudden explosion of merriment, whereat Uncle Phineas would look up and say, "Tut, tut," and Aunt Kezzy would make a speech about wicked children breaking the Sabbath day. I remember once how my Cousin Bill got into deep disgrace one Sunday by a roguish trick. He was just about to close his Bible with all sobriety, when snap came a grasshopper through an open window, and alighted in the middle of the page. Bill instantly kidnapped the intruder, for so important an auxiliary in the way of employment was not to be despised. Presently we children looked towards Bill, and there he sat, very demurely reading his Bible, with the grasshopper hanging by one leg from the corner of his mouth, kicking and sprawling, without in the least disturbing Master William's gravity. We all burst into an uproarious laugh. But it came to be rather a serious affair for Bill, as his good father was in the practice of enforcing truth and duty by certain modes of moral suasion much recommended by Solomon, though fallen into disrepute at the present day.

This morning picture may give a good specimen of the whole livelong Sunday, which presented only an alternation of similar scenes until sunset, when a universal unchaining of tongues and a general scamper proclaimed that the "sun was down."

But, it may be asked, what was the result of all this strictness? Did it not disgust you with the Sabbath and with religion? No, it did not. It did not, because it was the result of no unkindly feeling, but of consistent principle; and consistency of principle is what even children learn to appreciate and revere. The law of obedience and of reverence for the Sabbath was constraining so equally on the young and the old, that its claims came to be regarded like those immutable laws of nature, which no one thinks of being out of patience with, though they sometimes bear hard on personal convenience. The effect of the system was to ingrain into our character a veneration for the Sabbath which no friction of after life would ever efface. I have lived to wander in many climates and foreign lands, where the Sabbath is an unknown name, or where it is only recognized by noisy mirth; but never has the day returned without bringing with it a breathing of religious awe, and even a yearning for the unbroken stillness, the placid repose, and the simple devotion of the Puritan Sabbath.

ANOTHER SCENE

"How late we are this morning!" said Mrs. Roberts to her husband, glancing hurriedly at the clock, as they were sitting down to breakfast on a Sabbath morning. "Really, it is a shame to us to be so late Sundays. I wonder John and Henry are not up yet: Hannah, did you speak to them?"

"Yes, ma'am, but I could not make them mind; they said it was Sunday, and that we always have breakfast later Sundays."

"Well, it is a shame to us, I must say," said Mrs. Roberts, sitting down to the table. "I never lie late myself unless something in particular happens. Last night I was out very late, and Sabbath before last I had a bad headache."

"Well, well, my dear," said Mr. Roberts, "it is not worth while to worry yourself about it; Sunday is a day of rest; everybody indulges a little of a Sunday morning, it is so very natural, you know; one's work done up, one feels like taking a little rest."

"Well, I must say it was not the way my mother brought me up," said Mrs. Roberts; "and I really can't feel it to be right."

This last part of the discourse had been listened to by two sleepy-looking boys, who had, meanwhile, taken their seats at table with that listless air which is the result of late sleeping.

"Oh, by the bye, my dear, what did you give for those hams Saturday?" said Mr. Roberts.

"Eleven cents a pound, I believe," replied Mrs. Roberts; "but Stephens and Philips have some much nicer, canvas and all, for ten cents. I think we had better get our things at Stephens and Philips's in future, my dear."

"Why? are they much cheaper?"

"Oh, a great deal; but I forget it is Sunday. We ought to be thinking of other things. Boys, have you looked over your Sunday-school lesson?"

"No, ma'am."

"Now, how strange! and here it wants only half an hour of the time, and you are not dressed either. Now, see the bad effects of not being up in time."

The boys looked sullen, and said "they were up as soon as any one else in the house."

"Well, your father and I had some excuse, because we were out late last night; you ought to have been up full three hours ago, and to have been all ready, with your lessons learned. Now, what do you suppose you shall do?"

"Oh, mother, do let us stay at home this one morning; we don't know the lesson, and it won't do any good for us to go."

"No, indeed, I shall not. You must go and get along as well as you can. It is all your own fault. Now, go upstairs and hurry. We shall not find time for prayers this morning."

The boys took themselves upstairs to "hurry," as directed, and soon one of them called from the top of the stairs, "Mother! mother! the buttons are off this vest; so I can't wear it!" and "Mother! here is a long rip in my best coat!" said another.

"Why did you not tell me of it before?" said Mrs. Roberts, coming upstairs.

"I forgot it," said the boy.

"Well, well, stand still; I must catch it together somehow, if it is Sunday. There! there is the bell! Stand still a minute!" and Mrs. Roberts plied needle, and thread, and scissors; "there, that will do for to-day. Dear me, how confused everything is to-day!"

"It is always just so Sundays," said John, flinging up his book and catching it again as he ran downstairs.

"It is always just so Sundays." These words struck rather unpleasantly on Mrs. Roberts's conscience, for something told her that, whatever the reason might be, it _was_ just so. On Sunday everything was later and more irregular than any other day in the week.

"Hannah, you must boil that piece of beef for dinner to-day."

"I thought you told me you did not have cooking done on Sunday."

"No, I do not, generally. I am very sorry Mr. Roberts would get that piece of meat yesterday. We did not need it, but here it is on our hands; the weather is too hot to keep it. It won't do to let it spoil; so I must have it boiled, for aught I see."

Hannah had lived four Sabbaths with Mrs. Roberts, and on two of them she had been required to cook from similar reasoning. "For once" is apt, in such cases, to become a phrase of very extensive signification.

"It really worries me to have things go on so as they do on Sundays," said Mrs. Roberts to her husband. "I never do feel as if we kept Sunday as we ought."

"My dear, you have been saying so ever since we were married, and I do not see what you are going to do about it. For my part I do not see why we do not do as well as people in general. We do not visit, nor receive company, nor read improper books. We go to church, and send the children to Sunday-school, and so the greater part of the day is spent in a religious way. Then out of church we have the children's Sunday-school books, and one or two religious newspapers. I think that is quite enough."

"But, somehow, when I was a child, my mother"--said Mrs. Roberts, hesitating.

"Oh, my dear, your mother must not be considered an exact pattern for these days. People were too strict in your mother's time; they carried the thing too far, altogether; everybody allows it now."

Mrs. Roberts was silenced, but not satisfied. A strict religious education had left just conscience enough on this subject to make her uneasy.

These worthy people had a sort of general idea that Sunday ought to be kept, and they intended to keep it; but they had never taken the trouble to investigate or inquire as to the most proper way, nor was it so much an object of interest that their weekly arrangements were planned with any reference to it. Mr. Roberts would often engage in business at the close of the week, which he knew would so fatigue him that he would be weary and listless on Sunday; and Mrs. Roberts would allow her family cares to accumulate in the same way, so that she was either wearied with efforts to accomplish it before the Sabbath, or perplexed and worried by finding everything at loose ends on that day. They had the idea that Sunday was to be kept when it was perfectly convenient, and did not demand any sacrifice of time or money. But if stopping to keep the Sabbath in a journey would risk passage money or a seat in the stage, or, in housekeeping, if it would involve any considerable inconvenience or expense, it was deemed a providential intimation that it was "a work of necessity and mercy" to attend to secular matters. To their minds the fourth command read thus: "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy when it comes convenient, and costs neither time nor money."

As to the effects of this on the children, there was neither enough of strictness to make them respect the Sabbath, nor of religious interest to make them love it; of course, the little restraint there was proved just enough to lead them to dislike and despise it. Children soon perceive the course of their parents' feelings, and it was evident to the children of this family that their father and mother generally found themselves hurried into the Sabbath with hearts and minds full of this world, and their conversation and thoughts were so constantly turning to worldly things, and so awkwardly drawn back by a sense of religious obligation, that the Sabbath appeared more obviously a clog and a fetter than it did under the strictest régime of Puritan days.

SKETCH SECOND

The little quiet village of Camden stands under the brow of a rugged hill in one of the most picturesque parts of New England; and its regular, honest, and industrious villagers were not a little surprised and pleased that Mr. James, a rich man, and pleasant-spoken withal, had concluded to take up his residence among them. He brought with him a pretty, genteel wife, and a group of rosy, romping, but amiable children; and there was so much of good nature and kindness about the manners of every member of the family, that the whole neighborhood were prepossessed in their favor. Mr. James was a man of somewhat visionary and theoretical turn of mind, and very much in the habit of following out his own ideas of right and wrong, without troubling himself particularly as to the appearance his course might make in the eyes of others. He was a supporter of the ordinances of religion, and always ready to give both time and money to promote any benevolent object; and though he had never made any public profession of religion, or connected himself with any particular set of Christians, still he seemed to possess great reverence for God, and to worship him in spirit and in truth, and he professed to make the Bible the guide of his life. Mr. James had been brought up under a system of injudicious religious restraint. He had determined, in educating his children, to adopt an exactly opposite course, and to make religion and all its institutions sources of enjoyment. His aim, doubtless, was an appropriate one; but his method of carrying it out, to say the least, was one which was not a safe model for general imitation. In regard to the Sabbath, for example, he considered that, although the plan of going to church twice a day, and keeping all the family quiet within doors the rest of the time, was good, other methods would be much better. Accordingly, after the morning service, which he and his whole family regularly attended, he would spend the rest of the day with his children. In bad weather he would instruct them in natural history, show them pictures, and read them various accounts of the works of God, combining all with such religious instruction and influence as a devotional mind might furnish. When the weather permitted, he would range with them through the fields, collecting minerals and plants, or sail with them on the lake, meanwhile directing the thoughts of his young listeners upward to God, by the many beautiful traces of his presence and agency, which superior knowledge and observation enabled him to discover and point out. These Sunday strolls were seasons of most delightful enjoyment to the children. Though it was with some difficulty that their father could restrain them from loud and noisy demonstrations of delight, and he saw with some regret that the mere animal excitement of the stroll seemed to draw the attention too much from religious considerations, and, in particular, to make the exercises of the morning seem like a preparatory penance to the enjoyments of the afternoon, nevertheless, when Mr. James looked back to his own boyhood, and remembered the frigid restraint, the entire want of any kind of mental or bodily excitement, which had made the Sabbath so much a weariness to him, he could not but congratulate himself when he perceived his children looking forward to Sunday as a day of delight, and found himself on that day continually surrounded by a circle of smiling and cheerful faces. His talent of imparting religious instruction in a simple and interesting form was remarkably happy, and it is probable that there was among his children an uncommon degree of real thought and feeling on religious subjects as the result.

The good people of Camden, however, knew not what to think of a course that appeared to them an entire violation of all the requirements of the Sabbath. The first impulse of human nature is to condemn at once all who vary from what has been commonly regarded as the right way; and, accordingly, Mr. James was unsparingly denounced, by many good people, as a Sabbath breaker, and infidel, and an opposer to religion.

Such was the character heard of him by Mr. Richards, a young clergyman, who, shortly after Mr. James fixed his residence in Camden, accepted the pastoral charge of the village. It happened that Mr. Richards had known Mr. James in college, and, remembering him as a remarkably serious, amiable, and conscientious man, he resolved to ascertain from himself the views which had led him to the course of conduct so offensive to the good people of the neighborhood.

"This is all very well, my good friend," said he, after he had listened to Mr. James's eloquent account of his own system of religious instruction, and its effects upon his family, "I do not doubt that this system does very well for yourself and family; but there are other things to be taken into consideration besides personal and family improvement. Do you not know, Mr. James, that the most worthless and careless part of my congregation quote your example as a respectable precedent for allowing their families to violate the order of the Sabbath? You and your children sail about on the lake, with minds and hearts, I doubt not, elevated and tranquilized by its quiet repose; but Ben Dakes, and his idle, profane army of children, consider themselves as doing very much the same thing when they lie lolling about, sunning themselves on its shore, or skipping stones over its surface the whole of a Sunday afternoon."

"Let every one answer to his own conscience," replied Mr. James. "If I keep the Sabbath conscientiously, I am approved of God; if another transgresses his conscience, 'to his own master he standeth or falleth.' I am not responsible for all the abuses that idle or evil-disposed persons may fall into, in consequence of my doing what is right."

"Let me quote an answer from the same chapter," said Mr. Richards. "'Let no man put a stumbling-block, or an occasion to fall, in his brother's way: let not your good be evil spoken of. It is good neither to eat flesh nor drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or made weak.' Now, my good friend, you happen to be endowed with a certain tone of mind which enables you to carry through your mode of keeping the Sabbath with little comparative evil, and much good, so far as your family is concerned; but how many persons in this neighborhood, do you suppose, would succeed equally well if they were to attempt it? If it were the common custom for families to absent themselves from public worship in the afternoon, and to stroll about the fields, or ride, or sail, how many parents, do you suppose, would have the dexterity and talent to check all that was inconsistent with the duties of the day? Is it not your ready command of language, your uncommon tact in simplifying and illustrating, your knowledge of natural history and of Biblical literature, that enable you to accomplish the results that you do? And is there one parent in a hundred that could do the same? Now, just imagine our neighbor, 'Squire Hart, with his ten boys and girls, turned out into the fields on a Sunday afternoon to profit withal: you know he can never finish a sentence without stopping to begin it again half a dozen times. What progress would he make in instructing them? And so of a dozen others I could name along this very street here. Now, you men of cultivated minds must give your countenance to courses which would be best for society at large, or, as the sentiment was expressed by St. Paul, 'We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves, for even Christ pleased not himself.' Think, my dear sir, if our Saviour had gone only on the principle of avoiding what might be injurious to his own improvement, how unsafe his example might have proved to less elevated minds. Doubtless he might have made a Sabbath day fishing excursion an occasion of much elevated and impressive instruction; but, although he declared himself 'Lord of the Sabbath day,' and at liberty to suspend its obligation at his own discretion, yet he never violated the received method of observing it, except in cases where superstitious tradition trenched directly on those interests which the Sabbath was given to promote. He asserted the right to relieve pressing bodily wants, and to administer to the necessities of others on the Sabbath, but beyond that he allowed himself in no deviation from established custom."

Mr. James looked thoughtful. "I have not reflected on the subject in this view," he replied. "But, my dear sir, considering how little of the public services of the Sabbath is on a level with the capacity of younger children, it seems to me almost a pity to take them to church the whole of the day."

"I have thought of that myself," replied Mr. Richards, "and have sometimes thought that, could persons be found to conduct such a thing, it would be desirable to institute a separate service for children, in which the exercises should be particularly adapted to them."

"I should like to be minister to a congregation of children," said Mr. James warmly.

"Well," replied Mr. Richards, "give our good people time to get acquainted with you, and do away the prejudices which your extraordinary mode of proceeding has induced, and I think I could easily assemble such a company for you every Sabbath."

After this, much to the surprise of the village, Mr. James and his family were regular attendants at both the services of the Sabbath. Mr. Richards explained to the good people of his congregation the motives which had led their neighbor to the adoption of what, to them, seemed so unchristian a course; and, upon reflection, they came to the perception of the truth, that a man may depart very widely from the received standard of right for other reasons than being an infidel or an opposer of religion. A ready return of cordial feeling was the result; and as Mr. James found himself treated with respect and confidence, he began to feel, notwithstanding his fastidiousness, that there were strong points of congeniality between all real and warm-hearted Christians, however different might be their intellectual culture, and in all simplicity united himself with the little church of Camden. A year from the time of his first residence there, every Sabbath afternoon saw him surrounded by a congregation of young children, for whose benefit he had, at his own expense, provided a room, fitted up with maps, Scriptural pictures, and every convenience for the illustration of Biblical knowledge; and the parents or guardians who from time to time attended their children during these exercises often confessed themselves as much interested and benefited as any of their youthful companions.

SKETCH THIRD

It was near the close of a pleasant Saturday afternoon that I drew up my weary horse in front of a neat little dwelling in the village of N. This, as near as I could gather from description, was the house of my cousin, William Fletcher, the identical rogue of a Bill Fletcher, of whom we have aforetime spoken. Bill had always been a thriving, push-ahead sort of a character, and during the course of my rambling life I had improved every occasional opportunity of keeping up our early acquaintance. The last time that I returned to my native country, after some years of absence, I heard of him as married and settled in the village of N., where he was conducting a very prosperous course of business, and shortly after received a pressing invitation to visit him at his own home. Now, as I had gathered from experience the fact that it is of very little use to rap one's knuckles off on the front door of a country house without any knocker, I therefore made the best of my way along a little path, bordered with marigolds and balsams, that led to the back part of the dwelling. The sound of a number of childish voices made me stop, and, looking through the bushes, I saw the very image of my Cousin Bill Fletcher, as he used to be twenty years ago; the same bold forehead, the same dark eyes, the same smart, saucy mouth, and the same "who-cares-for-that" toss to his head. "There, now," exclaimed the boy, setting down a pair of shoes that he had been blacking, and arranging them at the head of a long row of all sizes and sorts, from those which might have fitted a two-year-old foot upward, "there, I've blacked every single one of them, and made them shine too, and done it all in twenty minutes; if anybody thinks they can do it quicker than that, I'd just like to have them try; that's all."

"I know they couldn't, though," said a fair-haired little girl, who stood admiring the sight, evidently impressed with the utmost reverence for her brother's ability; "and, Bill, I've been putting up all the playthings in the big chest, and I want you to come and turn the lock--the key hurts my fingers."

"Poh! I can turn it easier than that," said the boy, snapping his fingers; "have you got them all in?"

"Yes, all; only I left out the soft bales, and the string of red beads, and the great rag baby for Fanny to play with--you know mother says babies must have their playthings Sunday."

"Oh, to be sure," said the brother very considerately; "babies can't read, you know, as we can, nor hear Bible stories, nor look at pictures." At this moment I stepped forward, for the spell of former times was so powerfully on me, that I was on the very point of springing forward with a "Halloo, there, Bill!" as I used to meet the father in old times; but the look of surprise that greeted my appearance brought me to myself.

"Is your father at home?" said I.

"Father and mother are both gone out; but I guess, sir, they will be home in a few moments: won't you walk in?"

I accepted the invitation, and the little girl showed me into a small and very prettily furnished parlor. There was a piano with music-books on one side of the room, some fine pictures hung about the walls, and a little, neat centre-table was plentifully strewn with books. Besides this, the two recesses on each side of the fireplace contained each a bookcase with a glass locked door.

The little girl offered me a chair, and then lingered a moment, as if she felt some disposition to entertain me if she could only think of something to say; and at last, looking up in my face, she said in a confidential tone, "Mother says she left Willie and me to keep house this afternoon while she was gone, and we are putting up all the things for Sunday, so as to get everything done before she comes home. Willie has gone to put away the playthings, and I'm going to put up the books." So saying, she opened the doors of one of the bookcases, and began busily carrying the books from the centre-table to deposit them on the shelves, in which employment she was soon assisted by Willie, who took the matter in hand in a very masterly manner, showing his sister what were and what were not "Sunday books" with the air of a person entirely at home in the business. "Robinson Crusoe" and the many-volumed Peter Parley were put by without hesitation; there was, however, a short demurring over a "North American Review," because Willie said he was sure his father read something one Sunday out of it while Susan averred that he did not commonly read in it, and only read in it then because the piece was something about the Bible; but as nothing could be settled definitively on the point, the review was "laid on the table," like knotty questions in Congress. Then followed a long discussion over an extract book, which, as usual, contained all sorts, both sacred, serious, comic, and profane; and at last Willie, with much gravity, decided to lock it up, on the principle that it was best to be on the safe side, in support of which he appealed to me. I was saved from deciding the question by the entrance of the father and mother. My old friend knew me at once, and presented his pretty wife to me with the same look of exultation with which he used to hold up a string of trout or an uncommonly fine perch of his own catching for my admiration, and then looking round on his fine family of children, two more of which he had brought home with him, seemed to say to me, "There! what do you think of that, now?"

And, in truth, a very pretty sight it was--enough to make any one's old bachelor coat sit very uneasily on him. Indeed, there is nothing that gives one such a startling idea of the tricks that old Father Time has been playing on us, as to meet some boyish or girlish companions with half a dozen or so of thriving children about them. My old friend, I found, was in essence just what the boy had been. There was the same upright bearing, the same confident, cheerful tone to his voice, and the same fire in his eye; only that the hand of manhood had slightly touched some of the lines of his face, giving them a staidness of expression becoming the man and the father.

"Very well, my children," said Mrs. Fletcher, as, after tea, William and Susan finished recounting to her the various matters that they had set in order that afternoon; "I believe now we can say that our week's work is finished, and that we have nothing to do but rest and enjoy ourselves."

"Oh, and papa will show us the pictures in those great books that he brought home for us last Monday, will he not?" said little Robert.

"And, mother, you will tell us some more about Solomon's temple and his palaces, won't you?" said Susan.

"And I should like to know if father has found out the answer to that hard question I gave him last Sunday?" said Willie.

"All will come in good time," said Mrs. Fletcher. "But tell me, my dear children, are you sure that you are quite ready for the Sabbath? You say you have put away the books and the playthings; have you put away, too, all wrong and unkind feelings? Do you feel kindly and pleasantly towards everybody?"

"Yes, mother," said Willie, who appeared to have taken a great part of this speech to himself; "I went over to Tom Walter's this very morning to ask him about that chicken of mine, and he said that he did not mean to hit it, and did not know he had till I told him of it; and so we made all up again, and I am glad I went."

"I am inclined to think, Willie," said his father, "that if everybody would make it a rule to settle up all their differences before Sunday, there would be very few long quarrels and lawsuits. In about half the cases, a quarrel is founded on some misunderstanding that would be got over in five minutes if one would go directly to the person for explanation."

"I suppose I need not ask you," said Mrs. Fletcher, "whether you have fully learned your Sunday-school lessons?"

"Oh, to be sure," said William. "You know, mother, that Susan and I were busy about them through Monday and Tuesday, and then this afternoon we looked them over again, and wrote down some questions."

"And I heard Robert say his all through, and showed him all the places on the Bible Atlas," said Susan.

"Well, then," said my friend, "if everything is done, let us begin Sunday with some music."

Thanks to the recent improvements in the musical instruction of the young, every family can now form a domestic concert, with words and tunes adapted to the capacity and the voices of children; and while these little ones, full of animation, pressed round their mother as she sat at the piano, and accompanied her music with the words of some beautiful hymns, I thought that, though I might have heard finer music, I had never listened to any that answered the purpose of music so well.

It was a custom at my friend's to retire at an early hour on Saturday evening, in order that there might be abundant time for rest, and no excuse for late rising on the Sabbath; and, accordingly, when the children had done singing, after a short season of family devotion, we all betook ourselves to our chambers, and I, for one, fell asleep with the impression of having finished the week most agreeably, and with anticipations of very great pleasure on the morrow.

Early in the morning I was roused from my sleep by the sound of little voices singing with great animation in the room next to mine, and, listening, I caught the following words:--

"Awake! awake! your bed forsake, To God your praises pay; The morning sun is clear and bright; With joy we hail his cheerful light. In songs of love Praise God above-- It is the Sabbath day!"

The last words were repeated and prolonged most vehemently by a voice that I knew for Master William's.

"Now, Willie, I like the other one best," said the soft voice of little Susan; and immediately she began:--

"How sweet is the day, When, leaving our play, The Saviour we seek! The fair morning glows When Jesus arose-- The best in the week."

Master William helped along with great spirit in the singing of this tune, though I heard him observing, at the end of the first verse, that he liked the other one better, because "it seemed to step off so kind o' lively;" and his accommodating sister followed him as he began singing it again with redoubled animation.

It was a beautiful summer morning, and the voices of the children within accorded well with the notes of birds and bleating flocks without--a cheerful, yet Sabbath-like and quieting sound.

"Blessed be children's music!" said I to myself; "how much better this is than the solitary tick, tick, of old Uncle Fletcher's tall mahogany clock!"

The family bell summoned us to the breakfast room just as the children had finished their hymn. The little breakfast parlor had been swept and garnished expressly for the day, and a vase of beautiful flowers, which the children had the day before collected from their gardens, adorned the centre-table. The door of one of the bookcases by the fireplace was thrown open, presenting to view a collection of prettily bound books, over the top of which appeared in gilt letters the inscription, "Sabbath Library." The windows were thrown open to let in the invigorating breath of the early morning, and the birds that flitted among the rose-bushes without seemed scarcely lighter and more buoyant than did the children as they entered the room. It was legibly written on every face in the house, that the happiest day in the week had arrived, and each one seemed to enter into its duties with a whole soul. It was still early when the breakfast and the season of family devotion were over, and the children eagerly gathered round the table to get a sight of the pictures in the new books which their father had purchased in New York the week before, and which had been reserved as a Sunday's treat. They were a beautiful edition of Calmet's Dictionary, in several large volumes, with very superior engravings.

"It seems to me that this work must be very expensive," I remarked to my friend, as we were turning the leaves.

"Indeed it is so," he replied; "but here is one place where I am less withheld by considerations of expense than in any other. In all that concerns making a show in the world, I am perfectly ready to economize. I can do very well without expensive clothing or fashionable furniture, and am willing that we should be looked on as very plain sort of people in all such matters; but in all that relates to the cultivation of the mind, and the improvement of the hearts of my children, I am willing to go to the extent of my ability. Whatever will give my children a better knowledge of, or deeper interest in, the Bible, or enable them to spend a Sabbath profitably and without weariness, stands first on my list among things to be purchased. I have spent in this way one third as much as the furnishing of my house costs me." On looking over the shelves of the Sabbath Library, I perceived that my friend had been at no small pains in the selection. It comprised all the popular standard works for the illustration of the Bible, together with the best of the modern religious publications adapted to the capacity of young children. Two large drawers below were filled with maps and Scriptural engravings, some of them of a very superior character.

"We have been collecting these things gradually ever since we have been at housekeeping," said my friend; "the children take an interest in this library, as something more particularly belonging to them, and some of the books are donations from their little earnings."

"Yes," said Willie, "I bought Helon's 'Pilgrimage' with my egg money, and Susan bought the 'Life of David,' and little Robert is going to buy one, too, next New Year."

"But," said I, "would not the Sunday-school library answer all the purpose of this?"

"The Sabbath-school library is an admirable thing," said my friend; "but this does more fully and perfectly what that was intended to do. It makes a sort of central attraction at home on the Sabbath, and makes the acquisition of religious knowledge and the proper observance of the Sabbath a sort of family enterprise. You know," he added, smiling, "that people always feel interested for an object in which they have invested money."

The sound of the first Sabbath-school bell put an end to this conversation. The children promptly made themselves ready, and as their father was the superintendent of the school, and their mother one of the teachers, it was quite a family party.

One part of every Sabbath at my friend's was spent by one or both parents with the children in a sort of review of the week. The attention of the little ones was directed to their own characters, the various defects or improvements of the past week were pointed out, and they were stimulated to be on their guard in the time to come, and the whole was closed by earnest prayer for such heavenly aid as the temptations and faults of each particular one might need. After church in the evening, while the children were thus withdrawn to their mother's apartment, I could not forbear reminding my friend of old times, and of the rather anti-sabbatical turn of his mind in our boyish days.

"Now, William," said I, "do you know that you were the last boy of whom such an enterprise in Sabbath-keeping as this was to have been expected? I suppose you remember Sunday at 'the old place'?"

"Nay, now, I think I was the very one," said he, smiling, "for I had sense enough to see, as I grew up, that the day must be kept thoroughly or not at all, and I had enough blood and motion in my composition to see that something must be done to enliven and make it interesting; so I set myself about it. It was one of the first of our housekeeping resolutions, that the Sabbath should be made a pleasant day, and yet be as inviolably kept as in the strictest times of our good father; and we have brought things to run in that channel so long that it seems to be the natural order."

"I have always supposed," said I, "that it required a peculiar talent, and more than common information in a parent, to accomplish this to any extent."

"It requires nothing," replied my friend, "but common sense, and a strong determination to do it. Parents who make a definite object of the religious instruction of their children, if they have common sense, can very soon see what is necessary in order to interest them; and, if they find themselves wanting in the requisite information, they can, in these days, very readily acquire it. The sources of religious knowledge are so numerous, and so popular in their form, that all can avail themselves of them. The only difficulty after all is, that the keeping of the Sabbath and the imparting of religious instruction are not made enough of a _home_ object. Parents pass off the responsibility on to the Sunday-school teacher, and suppose, of course, if they send their children to Sunday-school, they do the best they can for them. Now, I am satisfied, from my experience as a Sabbath-school teacher, that the best religious instruction imparted abroad still stands in need of the coöperation of a systematic plan of religious discipline and instruction at home; for, after all, God gives a power to the efforts of a _parent_ that can never be transferred to other hands."

"But do you suppose," said I, "that the _common_ class of minds, with ordinary advantages, can do what you have done?"

"I think in most cases they could, if they begin right. But when both parents and children have formed habits, it is more difficult to change than to begin right at first. However, I think all might accomplish a great deal if they would give time, money, and effort towards it. It is because the object is regarded of so little value, compared with other things of a worldly nature, that so little is done."

My friend was here interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Fletcher with the children. Mrs. Fletcher sat down to the piano, and the Sabbath was closed with the happy songs of the little ones; nor could I notice a single anxious eye turning to the window to see if the sun was not almost down. The tender and softened expression of each countenance bore witness to the subduing power of those instructions which had hallowed the last hour, and their sweet, birdlike voices harmonized well with the beautiful words:--

"How sweet the light of Sabbath eve! How soft the sunbeam lingering there! Those holy hours this low earth leave, And rise on wings of faith and prayer."

RELIGIOUS POEMS

ST. CATHERINE BORNE BY ANGELS[6]

[6] According to this legend, Catherine was a noble maiden of Alexandria, distinguished alike by birth, riches, beauty, and the rarest gifts of genius and learning. In the flower of her life she consecrated herself to the service of her Redeemer, and cheerfully suffered for his sake the loss of wealth, friends, and the esteem of the world. Banishment, imprisonment, and torture were in vain tried to shake the constancy of her faith; and at last she was bound upon the torturing-wheel for a cruel death. But the angels descended, so says the story, rent the wheel, and bore her away, through the air, far over the sea, to Mount Sinai, where her body was left to repose, and her soul ascended with them to heaven.

Slow through the solemn air, in silence sailing, Borne by mysterious angels, strong and fair, She sleeps at last, blest dreams her eyelids veiling, Above this weary world of strife and care.

Lo how she passeth!--dreamy, slow, and calm: Scarce wave those broad, white wings, so silvery bright; Those cloudy robes, in star-emblazoned folding, Sweep mistily athwart the evening light.

Far, far below, the dim, forsaken earth, The foes that threaten, or the friends that weep; Past, like a dream, the torture and the pain: For so He giveth his beloved sleep.

The restless bosom of the surging ocean Gives back the image as the cloud floats o'er, Hushing in glassy awe his troubled motion; For one blest moment he complains no more.

Like the transparent golden floor of heaven, His charmèd waters lie as in a dream, And glistening wings, and starry robes unfolding, And serious angel eyes far downward gleam.

O restless sea! thou seemest all enchanted By that sweet vision of celestial rest; Where are the winds and tides thy peace that haunted,-- So still thou seemest, so glorified and blest!

Ah, sea! to-morrow, that sweet scene forgotten, Dark tides and tempests shall thy bosom rear; And thy complaining waves, with restless motion, Shall toss their hands in their old wild despair.

So o'er our hearts sometimes the sweet, sad story Of suffering saints, borne homeward crowned and blest, Shines down in stillness with a tender glory, And makes a mirror there of breathless rest.

For not alone in those old Eastern regions Are Christ's beloved ones tried by cross and chain; In many a house are his elect ones hidden, His martyrs suffering in their patient pain.

The rack, the cross, life's weary wrench of woe, The world sees not, as slow, from day to day, In calm, unspoken patience, sadly still, The loving spirit bleeds itself away.

But there are hours when, from the heavens unfolding, Come down the angels with the glad release; And we look upward, to behold in glory Our suffering loved ones borne away to peace.

Ah, brief the calm! the restless wave of feeling Rises again when the bright cloud sweeps by, And our unrestful souls reflect no longer That tender vision of the upper sky.

Espousèd Lord of the pure saints in glory, To whom all faithful souls affianced are, Breathe down thy peace into our restless spirits, And make a lasting, heavenly vision there.

So the bright gates no more on us shall close; No more the cloud of angels fade away; And we shall walk, amid life's weary strife, In the calm light of thine eternal day.

THE CHARMER

"_Socrates._ However, you and Simmias appear to me as if you wished to sift this subject more thoroughly, and to be afraid, like children, lest, on the soul's departure from the body, winds should blow it away.

"Upon this Cebes said, 'Endeavor to teach us better, Socrates. Perhaps there is a childish spirit in our breast that has such a dread. Let us endeavor to persuade him not to be afraid of death, as of hobgoblins.'

"'But you must charm him every day,' said Socrates, 'until you have quieted his fears.'

"'But whence, O Socrates,' he said, 'can we procure a skillful charmer for such a case, now you are about to leave us?'

"'Greece is wide, Cebes,' he said, 'and in it surely there are skillful men; and there are many barbarous nations, all of which you should search, seeking such a charmer, sparing neither money nor toil.'"--Last words of Socrates, as narrated by Plato in the _Phoedo_.

We need that charmer, for our hearts are sore With longings for the things that may not be, Faint for the friends that shall return no more, Dark with distrust, or wrung with agony.

"What is this life? and what to us is death? Whence came we? whither go? and where are those Who, in a moment stricken from our side, Passed to that land of shadow and repose?

"And are they all dust? and dust must we become? Or are they living in some unknown clime? Shall we regain them in that far-off home, And live anew beyond the waves of time?

"O man divine! on thee our souls have hung; Thou wert our teacher in these questions high; But ah! this day divides thee from our side, And veils in dust thy kindly guiding eye.

"Where is that Charmer whom thou bidst us seek? On what far shores may his sweet voice be heard? When shall these questions of our yearning souls Be answered by the bright Eternal Word?"

So spake the youth of Athens, weeping round, When Socrates lay calmly down to die; So spake the sage, prophetic of the hour When earth's fair morning star should rise on high.

They found Him not, those youths of soul divine, Long seeking, wandering, watching on life's shore; Reasoning, aspiring, yearning for the light, Death came and found them--doubting as before.

But years passed on; and lo! the Charmer came, Pure, simple, sweet, as comes the silver dew, And the world knew him not,--he walked alone Encircled only by his trusting few.

Like the Athenian sage, rejected, scorned, Betrayed, condemned, his day of doom drew nigh; He drew his faithful few more closely round, And told them that his hour was come--to die.

"Let not your heart be troubled," then He said, "My Father's house hath mansions large and fair; I go before you to prepare your place, I will return to take you with me there."

And since that hour the awful foe is charmed, And life and death are glorified and fair; Whither He went we know, the way we know, And with firm step press on to meet him there.

KNOCKING

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock."

Knocking, knocking, ever knocking? Who is there? 'Tis a pilgrim, strange and kingly, Never such was seen before;-- Ah, sweet soul, for such a wonder Undo the door.

No,--that door is hard to open; Hinges rusty, latch is broken; Bid Him go. Wherefore, with that knocking dreary Scare the sleep from one so weary? Say Him,--no.

Knocking, knocking, ever knocking? What! Still there? O sweet soul, but once behold Him, With the glory-crownèd hair; And those eyes, so strange and tender, Waiting there; Open! Open! Once behold Him,-- Him, so fair.

Ah, that door! Why wilt Thou vex me, Coming ever to perplex me? For the key is stiffly rusty, And the bolt is clogged and dusty; Many-fingered ivy-vine Seals it fast with twist and twine; Weeds of years and years before Choke the passage of that door.

Knocking! knocking! What! still knocking? He still there? What's the hour? The night is waning,-- In my heart a drear complaining, And a chilly, sad unrest! Ah, this knocking! It disturbs me, Scares my sleep with dreams unblest! Give me rest, Rest,--ah, rest!

Rest, dear soul, He longs to give thee; Thou hast only dreamed of pleasure, Dreamed of gifts and golden treasure, Dreamed of jewels in thy keeping, Waked to weariness of weeping;-- Open to thy soul's one Lover, And thy night of dreams is over,-- The true gifts He brings have seeming More than all thy faded dreaming!

Did she open? Doth she? Will she? So, as wondering we behold, Grows the picture to a sign, Pressed upon your soul and mine; For in every breast that liveth Is that strange, mysterious door;-- Though forsaken and betangled, Ivy-gnarled and weed-bejangled, Dusty, rusty, and forgotten;-- There the piercèd hand still knocketh, And with ever-patient watching, With the sad eyes true and tender, With the glory-crownèd hair,-- Still a God is waiting there.

THE OLD PSALM TUNE

You asked, dear friend, the other day, Why still my charmèd ear Rejoiceth in uncultured tone That old psalm tune to hear?

I've heard full oft, in foreign lands, The grand orchestral strain, Where music's ancient masters live, Revealed on earth again,--

Where breathing, solemn instruments, In swaying clouds of sound, Bore up the yearning, trancèd soul, Like silver wings around;--

I've heard in old St. Peter's dome, Where clouds of incense rise, Most ravishing the choral swell Mount upwards to the skies.

And well I feel the magic power, When skilled and cultured art Its cunning webs of sweetness weaves Around the captured heart.

But yet, dear friend, though rudely sung, That old psalm tune hath still A pulse of power beyond them all My inmost soul to thrill.

Those halting tones that sound to you, Are not the tones I hear; But voices of the loved and lost There meet my longing ear.

I hear my angel mother's voice,-- Those were the words she sung; I hear my brother's ringing tones, As once on earth they rung;

And friends that walk in white above Come round me like a cloud, And far above those earthly notes Their singing sounds aloud.

There may be discord, as you say; Those voices poorly ring; But there's no discord in the strain Those upper spirits sing.

For they who sing are of the blest, The calm and glorified, Whose hours are one eternal rest On heaven's sweet floating tide.

Their life is music and accord; Their souls and hearts keep time In one sweet concert with the Lord,-- One concert vast, sublime.

And through the hymns they sang on earth Sometimes a sweetness falls On those they loved and left below, And softly homeward calls,--

Bells from our own dear fatherland, Borne trembling o'er the sea,-- The narrow sea that they have crossed, The shores where we shall be.

O sing, sing on, belovèd souls! Sing cares and griefs to rest; Sing, till entrancèd we arise To join you 'mong the blest

THE OTHER WORLD

It lies around us like a cloud, A world we do not see; Yet the sweet closing of an eye May bring us there to be.

Its gentle breezes fan our cheek; Amid our worldly cares, Its gentle voices whisper love, And mingle with our prayers.

Sweet hearts around us throb and beat, Sweet helping hands are stirred, And palpitates the veil between With breathings almost heard.

The silence, awful, sweet, and calm, They have no power to break; For mortal words are not for them To utter or partake.

So thin, so soft, so sweet, they glide, So near to press they seem, They lull us gently to our rest, They melt into our dream.

And in the hush of rest they bring 'Tis easy now to see How lovely and how sweet a pass The hour of death may be;--

To close the eye, and close the ear, Wrapped in a trance of bliss, And, gently drawn in loving arms, To swoon to that--from this,--

Scarce knowing if we wake or sleep, Scarce asking where we are, To feel all evil sink away, All sorrow and all care.

Sweet souls around us! watch us still; Press nearer to our side; Into our thoughts, into our prayers, With gentle helpings glide.

Let death between us be as naught, A dried and vanished stream; Your joy be the reality, Our suffering life the dream.

MARY AT THE CROSS

"Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother."

O wondrous mother! since the dawn of time Was ever love, was ever grief, like thine? O highly favored in thy joy's deep flow, And favored, even in this, thy bitterest woe!

Poor was that home in simple Nazareth Where, fairly growing, like some silent flower, Last of a kingly race, unknown and lowly, O desert lily, passed thy childhood's hour.

The world knew not the tender, serious maiden, Who through deep loving years so silent grew, Full of high thought and holy aspiration, Which the o'ershadowing God alone might view.

And then it came, that message from the highest, Such as to woman ne'er before descended, The almighty wings thy prayerful soul o'erspread, And with thy life the Life of worlds was blended.

What visions then of future glory filled thee, The chosen mother of that King unknown, Mother fulfiller of all prophecy Which, through dim ages, wondering seers had shown!

Well did thy dark eye kindle, thy deep soul Rise into billows, and thy heart rejoice; Then woke the poet's fire, the prophet's song, Tuned with strange burning words thy timid voice.

Then, in dark contrast, came the lowly manger, The outcast shed, the tramp of brutal feet; Again behold earth's learnèd and her lowly, Sages and shepherds, prostrate at thy feet.

Then to the temple bearing--hark again What strange conflicting tones of prophecy Breathe o'er the child foreshadowing words of joy, High triumph blent with bitter agony!

O highly favored thou in many an hour Spent in lone musings with thy wondrous Son, When thou didst gaze into that glorious eye, And hold that mighty hand within thine own.

Blest through those thirty years, when in thy dwelling He lived a God disguised with unknown power; And thou his sole adorer, his best love, Trusting, revering, waited for his hour.

Blest in that hour, when called by opening heaven With cloud and voice, and the baptizing flame, Up from the Jordan walked th' acknowledged stranger, And awe-struck crowds grew silent as He came.

Blessèd, when full of grace, with glory crowned, He from both hands almighty favors poured, And, though He had not where to lay his head, Brought to his feet alike the slave and lord.

Crowds followed; thousands shouted, "Lo, our King!" Fast beat thy heart. Now, now the hour draws nigh: Behold the crown, the throne, the nations bend! Ah, no! fond mother, no! behold Him die!

Now by that cross thou tak'st thy final station, And shar'st the last dark trial of thy Son; Not with weak tears or woman's lamentation, But with high, silent anguish, like his own.

Hail! highly favored, even in this deep passion; Hail! in this bitter anguish thou art blest,-- Blest in the holy power with Him to suffer Those deep death-pangs that lead to higher rest.

All now is darkness; and in that deep stillness The God-man wrestles with that mighty woe; Hark to that cry, the rock of ages rending,-- "'Tis finished!" Mother, all is glory now!

By sufferings mighty as his mighty soul Hath the Redeemer risen forever blest; And through all ages must his heart-belovèd Through the same baptism enter the same rest.

THE INNER VOICE

"Come ye yourselves into a desert place and rest awhile; for there were many coming and going, so that they had no time so much as to eat."

'Mid the mad whirl of life, its dim confusion, Its jarring discords and poor vanity, Breathing like music over troubled waters, What gentle voice, O Christian, speaks to thee?

It is a stranger,--not of earth or earthly; By the serene, deep fullness of that eye,-- By the calm, pitying smile, the gesture lowly,-- It is thy Saviour as He passeth by.

"Come, come," He saith, "O soul oppressed and weary, Come to the shadows of my desert rest, Come walk with me far from life's babbling discords, And peace shall breathe like music in thy breast.

"Art thou bewildered by contesting voices,-- Sick to thy soul of party noise and strife? Come, leave it all, and seek that solitude Where thou shalt learn of me a purer life.

"When far behind the world's great tumult dieth, Thou shalt look back and wonder at its roar; But its far voice shall seem to thee a dream, Its power to vex thy holier life be o'er.

"There shalt thou learn the secret of a power, Mine to bestow, which heals the ills of living; To overcome by love, to live by prayer, To conquer man's worst evils by forgiving."

ABIDE IN ME, AND I IN YOU

THE SOUL'S ANSWER

That mystic word of thine, O sovereign Lord, Is all too pure, too high, too deep for me; Weary of striving, and with longing faint, I breathe it back again in _prayer_ to thee.

Abide in me, I pray, and I in thee; From this good hour, O leave me nevermore; Then shall the discord cease, the wound be healed, The lifelong bleeding of the soul be o'er.

Abide in me; o'ershadow by thy love Each half-formed purpose and dark thought of sin; Quench, e'er it rise, each selfish, low desire, And keep my soul as thine, calm and divine.

As some rare perfume in a vase of clay Pervades it with a fragrance not its own, So, when thou dwellest in a mortal soul, All heaven's own sweetness seems around it thrown.

Abide in me: there have been moments blest When I have heard thy voice and felt thy power; Then evil lost its grasp, and passion, hushed, Owned the divine enchantment of the hour.

These were but seasons, beautiful and rare; Abide in me, and they shall ever be. Fulfill at once thy precept and my prayer,-- Come, and abide in me, and I in thee.

THE SECRET

"Thou shalt keep them in the secret of thy presence from the strife of tongues."

When winds are raging o'er the upper ocean, And billows wild contend with angry roar, 'Tis said, far down beneath the wild commotion, That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore.

Far, far beneath, the noise of tempest dieth, And silver waves chime ever peacefully; And no rude storm, how fierce soe'er he flieth, Disturbs the sabbath of that deeper sea.

So to the soul that knows thy love, O Purest, There is a temple peaceful evermore! And all the babble of life's angry voices Die in hushed stillness at its sacred door.

Far, far away the noise of passion dieth, And loving thoughts rise ever peacefully; And no rude storm, how fierce soe'er he flieth, Disturbs that deeper rest, O Lord, in thee.

O rest of rests! O peace serene, eternal! Thou ever livest and thou changest never; And in the secret of thy presence dwelleth Fullness of joy, forever and forever.

THINK NOT ALL IS OVER

Think not, when the wailing winds of autumn Drive the shivering leaflets from the tree,-- Think not all is over: spring returneth, Buds and leaves and blossoms thou shalt see.

Think not, when the Earth lies cold and sealèd, And the weary birds above her mourn,-- Think not all is over: God still liveth, Songs and sunshine shall again return.

Think not, when thy heart is waste and dreary, When thy cherished hopes lie chill and sere,-- Think not all is over: God still loveth, He will wipe away thy every tear.

Weeping for a night alone endureth, God at last shall bring a morning hour; In the frozen buds of every winter Sleep the blossoms of a future flower.

LINES

TO THE MEMORY OF "ANNIE," WHO DIED AT MILAN, JUNE 6, 1860

"Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him."--JOHN XX. 15.

In the fair garden of celestial peace Walketh a Gardener in meekness clad; Fair are the flowers that wreathe his dewy locks, And his mysterious eyes are sweet and sad.

Fair are the silent foldings of his robes, Falling with saintly calmness to his feet; And when he walks, each floweret to his will With living pulse of sweet accord doth beat.

Every green leaf thrills to its tender heart, In the mild summer radiance of his eye; No fear of storm, or cold, or bitter frost, Shadows the flowerets when their sun is nigh.

And all our pleasant haunts of earthly love Are nurseries to those gardens of the air; And his far-darting eye, with starry beam, Watcheth the growing of his treasures there.

We call them ours, o'erwept with selfish tears, O'erwatched with restless longings night and day; Forgetful of the high, mysterious right He holds to bear our cherished plants away.

But when some sunny spot in those bright fields Needs the fair presence of an added flower, Down sweeps a starry angel in the night: At morn, the rose has vanished from our bower.

Where stood our tree, our flower, there is a grave! Blank, silent, vacant, but in worlds above, Like a new star outblossomed in the skies, The angels hail an added flower of love.

Dear friend, no more upon that lonely mound, Strewed with the red and yellow autumn leaf, Drop thou the tear, but raise the fainting eye Beyond the autumn mists of earthly grief.

Thy garden rosebud bore, within its breast, Those mysteries of color, warm and bright, That the bleak climate of this lower sphere Could never waken into form and light.

Yes, the sweet Gardener hath borne her hence, Nor must thou ask to take her thence away; Thou shalt behold her in some coming hour, Full-blossomed in his fields of cloudless day.

THE CROCUS

Beneath the sunny autumn sky, With gold leaves dropping round, We sought, my little friend and I, The consecrated ground, Where, calm beneath the holy cross, O'ershadowed by sweet skies, Sleeps tranquilly that youthful form, Those blue unclouded eyes.

Around the soft, green swelling mound We scooped the earth away, And buried deep the crocus-bulbs Against a coming day. "These roots are dry, and brown, and sere; Why plant them here?" he said, "To leave them, all the winter long, So desolate and dead."

"Dear child, within each sere dead form There sleeps a living flower, And angel-like it shall arise In spring's returning hour." Ah, deeper down--cold, dark, and chill-- We buried our heart's flower, But angel-like shall he arise In spring's immortal hour.

In blue and yellow from its grave Springs up the crocus fair, And God shall raise those bright blue eyes, Those sunny waves of hair. Not for a fading summer's morn, Not for a fleeting hour, But for an endless age of bliss, Shall rise our heart's dear flower.

CONSOLATION

WRITTEN AFTER THE SECOND BATTLE OF BULL RUN

"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea."

Ah, many-voiced and angry! how the waves Beat turbulent with terrible uproar! Is there no rest from tossing,--no repose? Where shall we find a haven and a shore?

What is secure from the land-dashing wave? There go our riches, and our hopes fly there; There go the faces of our best beloved, Whelmed in the vortex of its wild despair.

Whose son is safe? whose brother, and whose home? The dashing spray beats out the household fire; By blackened ashes weep our widowed souls Over the embers of our lost desire.

By pauses, in the fitful moaning storm, We hear triumphant notes of battle roll. Too soon the triumph sinks in funeral wail; The muffled drum, the death march, shakes the soul!

Rocks on all sides, and breakers! at the helm Weak human hand and weary human eyes. The shout and clamor of our dreary strife Goes up conflicting to the angry skies.

But for all this, O timid hearts, be strong; Be of good cheer, for, though the storm must be, _It hath its Master_: from the depths shall rise New heavens, new earth, where shall be no more sea.

No sea, no tossing, no unrestful storm! Forever past the anguish and the strife; The poor old weary earth shall bloom again, With the bright foliage of that better life.

And war, and strife, and hatred, shall be past, And misery be a forgotten dream. The Shepherd God shall lead his peaceful fold By the calm meadows and the quiet stream.

Be still, be still, and know that he is God; Be calm, be trustful; work, and watch, and pray, Till from the throes of this last anguish rise The light and gladness of that better day.

"ONLY A YEAR"

One year ago,--a ringing voice, A clear blue eye, And clustering curls of sunny hair, Too fair to die.

Only a year,--no voice, no smile, No glance of eye, No clustering curls of golden hair, Fair but to die!

One year ago,--what loves, what schemes Far into life! What joyous hopes, what high resolves, What generous strife!

The silent picture on the wall, The burial stone, Of all that beauty, life, and joy Remain alone!

One year,--one year,--one little year, And so much gone! And yet the even flow of life Moves calmly on.

The grave grows green, the flowers bloom fair, Above that head; No sorrowing tint of leaf or spray Says he is dead.

No pause or hush of merry birds, That sing above, Tells us how coldly sleeps below The form we love.

Where hast thou been this year, beloved? What hast thou seen? What visions fair, what glorious life, Where thou hast been?

The veil! the veil! so thin, so strong! 'Twixt us and thee; The mystic veil! when shall it fall, That we may see?

Not dead, not sleeping, not even gone, But present still, And waiting for the coming hour Of God's sweet will.

Lord of the living and the dead, Our Saviour dear! We lay in silence at thy feet This sad, sad year!

BELOW

Loudly sweep the winds of autumn O'er that lone, belovèd grave, Where we laid those sunny ringlets, When those blue eyes set like stars, Leaving us to outer darkness. O the longing and the aching! O the sere deserted grave!

Let the grass turn brown upon thee, Brown and withered like our dreams! Let the wind moan through the pine-trees With a dreary, dirge-like whistle, Sweep the dead leaves on its bosom,-- Moaning, sobbing through the branches, Where the summer laughed so gayly.

He is gone, our boy of summer,-- Gone the light of his blue eyes, Gone the tender heart and manly, Gone the dreams and the aspirings,-- Nothing but the _mound_ remaineth, And the aching in our bosoms, Ever aching, ever throbbing: Who shall bring it unto rest?

ABOVE

A VISION

Coming down a golden street I beheld my vanished one, And he moveth on a cloud, And his forehead wears a star; And his blue eyes, deep and holy, Fixed as in a blessèd dream, See some mystery of joy, Some unuttered depth of love.

And his vesture is as blue As the skies of summer are, Falling with a saintly sweep, With a sacred stillness swaying; And he presseth to his bosom Harps of strange and mystic fashion, And his hands, like living pearls, Wander o'er the golden strings.

And the music that ariseth, Who can utter or divine it? In that strange celestial thrilling, Every memory of sorrow, Every heart-ache, every anguish, Every fear for the to-morrow, Melt away in charmèd rest.

And there be around him many, Bright with robes like evening clouds,-- Tender green and clearest amber, Crimson fading into rose, Robes of flames and robes of silver,-- And their hues all thrill and tremble With a living light of feeling, Deepening with each heart's pulsation, Till in vivid trance of color That celestial rainbow glows.

How they float and wreathe and brighten, Bending low their starry brows, Singing with a tender cadence, And their hands, like spotless lilies, Folded on their prayerful breasts. In their singing seem to mingle Tender airs of bygone days;-- Mother-hymnings by the cradle, Mother-moanings by the grave, Songs of human love and sorrow, Songs of endless love and rest;-- In the pauses of that music Every throb of sorrow dies.

O my own, my heart's belovèd, Vainly have I wept above thee? Would I call thee from thy glory To this world's impurity?-- Lo! it passeth, it dissolveth, All the vision melts away; But as if a heavenly lily Dropped into my aching breast, With a healing sweetness laden, With a mystic breath of rest, I am charmed into forgetting Autumn winds and dreary grave.

LINES

SUGGESTED BY THE DEATH OF THE WIFE OF MOSES STUART, OF ANDOVER, MASS.

How quiet, through the hazy autumn air, The elm-boughs wave with many a gold-flecked leaf! How calmly float the dreamy mantled clouds Through these still days of autumn, fair and brief!

Our Andover stands thoughtful, fair, and calm, Waiting to lay her summer glories by E'er the bright flush shall kindle all her pines, And her woods blaze with autumn's heraldry.

By the old mossy wall the goldenrod Waves as aforetime, and the purple sprays Of starry asters quiver to the breeze, Rustling all stilly through the forest ways.

No voice of triumph from those silent skies Breaks on the calm, and speaks of glories near, Nor bright wings flutter, nor fair glistening robes Proclaim that heavenly messengers are here.

Yet in our midst an angel hath come down, Troubling the waters in a peaceful home; And from that home, of life's long sickness healed, A saint hath risen, where pain no more may come.

Christ's fair elect one, from a hidden life Of loving deeds and words of gentleness, Hath passed where all are loving and beloved, Beyond all weariness and all distress.

Calm, like a lamb in shepherd's bosom borne, Quiet and trustful hath she sunk to rest; God breathed in tenderness the sweet "Well done!" That scarce awoke a trance so still and blest.

Ye who remember the long loving years, The patient mother's hourly martyrdom, The self-renouncing wisdom, the calm trust, Rejoice for her whose day of rest is come!

Father and mother, now united, stand Waiting for you to bind the household chain; The tent is struck, the home is gone before, And tarries for you on the heavenly plain.

By every wish repressed and hope resigned, Each cross accepted and each sorrow borne, She dead yet speaketh, she doth beckon you To tread the path her patient feet have worn.

Each year that world grows richer and more dear With the bright freight washed from life's stormy shore; O goodly clime, how lovely is thy strand, With those dear faces seen on earth no more!

The veil between this world and that to come Grows tremulous and quivers with their breath; Dimly we hear their voices, see their hands, Inviting us to the release of death.

O Thou, in whom thy saints above, below, Are one and undivided, grant us grace In patience yet to bear our daily cross,-- In patience run our hourly shortening race!

And while on earth we wear the servant's form, And while life's labors ever toilful be, Breathe in our souls the joyful confidence We are already kings and priests with thee.

SUMMER STUDIES

Why shouldst thou study in the month of June In dusky books of Greek and Hebrew lore, When the Great Teacher of all glorious things Passes in hourly light before thy door?

There is a brighter book unrolling now; Fair are its leaves as is the tree of heaven, All veined and dewed and gemmed with wondrous signs, To which a healing mystic power is given.

A thousand voices to its study call, From the fair hilltop, from the waterfall, Where the bird singeth, and the yellow bee, And the breeze talketh from the airy tree.

Now is that glorious resurrection time When all earth's buried beauties have new birth: Behold the yearly miracle complete,-- God hath created a new heaven and earth!

No tree that wants its joyful garments now, No flower but hastes his bravery to don; God bids thee to this marriage feast of joy, Let thy soul put the wedding garment on.

All fringed with festal gold the barberry stands; The ferns, exultant, clap their new-made wings; The hemlock rustles broideries of fresh green, And thousand bells of pearl the blueberry rings.

The long, weird fingers of the old white-pines Do beckon thee into the flickering wood, Where moving spots of light show mystic flowers, And wavering music fills the dreamy hours.

Hast thou no _time_ for all this wondrous show,-- No thought to spare? Wilt thou forever be With thy last year's dry flower-stalk and dead leaves, And no new shoot or blossom on thy tree?

See how the pines push off their last year's leaves, And stretch beyond them with exultant bound: The grass and flowers, with living power, o'ergrow Their last year's remnants on the greening ground.

Wilt thou, then, all thy wintry feelings keep, The old dead routine of thy book-writ lore, Nor deem that God can teach, by one bright hour, What life hath never taught to thee before?

See what vast leisure, what unbounded rest, Lie in the bending dome of the blue sky: Ah! breathe that life-born languor from thy breast, And know once more a child's unreasoning joy.

Cease, cease to _think_, and be content _to be_; Swing safe at anchor in fair Nature's bay; Reason no more, but o'er thy quiet soul Let God's sweet teachings ripple their soft way.

Soar with the birds, and flutter with the leaf; Dance with the seeded grass in fringy play; Sail with the cloud, wave with the dreaming pine, And float with Nature all the livelong day.

Call not such hours an idle waste of time,-- Land that lies fallow gains a quiet power; It treasures, from the brooding of God's wings, Strength to unfold the future tree and flower.

And when the summer's glorious show is past, Its miracles no longer charm thy sight, The treasured riches of those thoughtful hours Shall make thy wintry musings warm and bright.

THE SHEPHERD'S CAROL

"O Shepherd of Israel, Thy lost flock are straying; Our Helper, our Saviour, How long thy delaying! Where, Lord, is thy promise To David of old, Of the King and the Shepherd To gather the fold!

"Cold, cold is the night wind, Our hearts have no cheer, Our Lord and our Leader, When wilt thou appear?" So sang the sad shepherds On Bethlehem's cold ground When lo, the bright angels In glory around!

"Peace, peace, ye dear shepherds, And be of good cheer; The Lord whom ye long for Is coming--is here! In the city of David Behold him appear-- A babe in a manger-- Go worship him there."

They went and were blessèd. Dear soul, go thou too; The Saviour for them Is the Saviour for you. Oh, kneel by the manger, Oh, kneel by the cross; Accept him, believe him,-- All else is but dross.

HOURS OF THE NIGHT OR WATCHES OF SORROW

I

MIDNIGHT

"He hath made me to dwell in darkness as those that have been long dead."

All dark!--no light, no ray! Sun, moon, and stars, all gone! Dimness of anguish!--utter void!-- Crushed, and alone!

One waste of weary pain, One dull, unmeaning ache, A heart too weary even to throb, Too bruised to break.

No longer anxious thoughts, No longer hopes and fears, No strife, no effort, no desire, No tears.

Daylight and leaves and flowers, Summer and song of bird!-- All vanished!--dreams forever gone, Unseen, unheard!

Love, beauty, youth,--all gone! The high, heroic vow, The buoyant hope, the fond desire,-- All ashes now!

The words they speak to me Far off and distant seem, As voices we have known and loved Speak in a dream.

They bid me to submit; I do,--I cannot strive; I do not question,--I endure, Endure and live.

I do not struggle more, Nor pray, for prayer is vain; I but lie still the weary hour, And bear my pain.

A guiding God, a Friend, A Father's gracious cheer, Once seemed my own; but now even faith Lies buried here.

This darkened, deathly life Is all remains of me, And but one conscious wish,-- To cease to be!

II

FIRST HOUR

"There was darkness over all the land from the sixth hour unto the ninth hour.

"And Jesus cried and said, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

That cry hath stirred the deadness of my soul; I feel a heart-string throb, as throbs a chord When breaks the master chord of some great harp; My heart responsive answers, "Why?" O Lord.

O cross of pain! O crown of cruel thorns! O piercing nails! O spotless Sufferer there! Wert _thou_ forsaken in thy deadly strife? Then canst thou pity me in my despair.

Take my dead heart, O Jesus, down with thee To that still sepulchre where thou didst rest; Lay it in the fair linen's spicy folds, As a dear mother lays her babe to rest.

I am so worn, so weary, so o'erspent, To lie with thee in that calm trance were sweet; The bitter myrrh of long-remembered pain May work in me new strength to rise again.

This dark and weary mystery of woe, This hopeless struggle, this most useless strife,-- Ah, let it end! I die with thee, my Lord, To all I ever hoped or wished from life.

I die with thee: thy fellowship of grief, Thy partnership with mortal misery, The weary watching and the nameless dread,-- Let them be mine to make me one with thee.

Thou hast asked, "Why?" and God will answer thee, Therefore I ask not, but in peace lie down, For the three days of mystery and rest, Till comes the resurrection and the crown.

III

SECOND HOUR

"They laid hold upon one Simon a Cyrenian, and on him they laid the cross, that he might bear it after Jesus."

Along the dusty thoroughfare of life, Upon his daily errands walking free, Came a brave, honest man, untouched by pain, Unchilled by sight or thought of misery.

But lo! a crowd:--he stops,--with curious eye A fainting form all pressed to earth he sees; The hard, rough burden of the bitter cross Hath bowed the drooping head and feeble knees.

Ho! lay the cross upon yon stranger there, For he hath breadth of chest and strength of limb. Straight it is done; and heavy laden thus, With Jesus' cross, he turns and follows him.

Unmurmuring, patient, cheerful, pitiful, Prompt with the holy sufferer to endure, Forsaking all to follow the dear Lord,-- Thus did he make his glorious calling sure.

O soul, whoe'er thou art, walking life's way, As yet from touch of deadly sorrow free, Learn from this story to forecast the day When Jesus and his cross shall come to thee.

O in that fearful, that decisive hour, Rebel not, shrink not, seek not thence to flee, But, humbly bending, take thy heavy load, And bear it after Jesus patiently.

His cross is thine. If thou and he be one, Some portion of his pain must still be thine; Thus only mayst thou share his glorious crown, And reign with him in majesty divine.

Master in sorrow! I accept my share In the great anguish of life's mystery. No more, alone, I sink beneath my load, But bear my cross, O Jesus, after thee.

IV

THIRD HOUR

THE MYSTERY OF LIFE

"Let my heart calm itself in thee. Let the great sea of my heart, that swelleth with waves, calm itself in thee."--ST. AUGUSTINE'S MANUAL.

Life's mystery--deep, restless as the ocean-- Hath surged and wailed for ages to and fro; Earth's generations watch its ceaseless motion, As in and out its hollow moanings flow. Shivering and yearning by that unknown sea, Let my soul calm itself, O Christ, in thee!

Life's sorrows, with inexorable power, Sweep desolation o'er this mortal plain; And human loves and hopes fly as the chaff Borne by the whirlwind from the ripened grain. Ah! when before that blast my hopes all flee, Let my soul calm itself, O Christ, in thee!

Between the mysteries of death and life Thou standest, loving, guiding, not explaining; We ask, and thou art silent; yet we gaze, And our charmed hearts forget their drear complaining. No crushing fate, no stony destiny, O Lamb that hast been slain, we find in thee!

The many waves of thought, the mighty tides, The ground-swell that rolls up from other lands, From far-off worlds, from dim, eternal shores, Whose echo dashes on life's wave-worn strands, This vague, dark tumult of the inner sea Grows calm, grows bright, O risen Lord, in thee!

Thy piercèd hand guides the mysterious wheels; Thy thorn-crowned brow now wears the crown of power; And when the dread enigma presseth sore, Thy patient voice saith, "Watch with me one hour." As sinks the moaning river in the sea In silver peace, so sinks my soul in thee!

V

FOURTH HOUR

THE SORROWS OF MARY

DEDICATED TO THE MOTHERS WHO HAVE LOST SONS IN THE LATE WAR

I slept, but my heart was waking, And out in my dreams I sped, Through the streets of an ancient city, Where Jesus, the Lord, lay dead.

He was lying all cold and lowly, And the sepulchre was sealed, And the women that bore the spices Had come from the holy field.

There is feasting in Pilate's palace, There is revel in Herod's hall, Where the lute and the sounding instrument To mirth and merriment call.

"I have washed my hands," said Pilate, "And what is the Jew to me?" "I have missed my chance," said Herod, "One of his wonders to see.

"But why should our courtly circle To the thought give further place? All dreams, save of pleasure and beauty, Bid the dancers' feet efface."

. . . . . . . .

I saw a light from a casement, And entered a lowly door, Where a woman, stricken and mournful, Sat in sackcloth on the floor.

There Mary, the mother of Jesus, And John, the belovèd one, With a few poor friends beside them, Were mourning for Him that was gone.

And before the mother was lying That crown of cruel thorn, Wherewith they crowned that gentle brow In mockery that morn.

And her ears yet ring with the anguish Of that last dying cry,-- That mighty appeal of agony That shook both earth and sky.

O God, what a shaft of anguish Was that dying voice from the tree!-- From Him the only spotless,-- "Why hast Thou forsaken me?"

And was he of God forsaken? They ask, appalled with dread; Is evil crowned and triumphant, And goodness vanquished and dead?

Is there, then, no God in Jacob? Is the star of Judah dim? For who would our God deliver, If he would not deliver him?

If God _could_ not deliver,--what hope then? If he _would_ not,--who ever shall dare To be firm in his service hereafter? To trust in his wisdom or care?

So darkly the Tempter was saying, To hearts that with sorrow were dumb; And the poor souls were clinging in darkness to God, With hands that with anguish were numb.

. . . . . . . .

In my dreams came the third day morning, And fairly the day-star shone; But fairer, the solemn angel, As he rolled away the stone.

In the lowly dwelling of Mary, In the dusky twilight chill, There was heard the sound of coming feet, And her very heart grew still.

And in the glimmer of dawning, She saw him enter the door, Her Son, all living and real, Risen, to die no more!

Her Son, all living and real, Risen no more to die,-- With the power of an endless life in his face, With the light of heaven in his eye.

O mourning mothers, so many, Weeping o'er sons that are dead, Have ye thought of the sorrows of Mary's heart, Of the tears that Mary shed?

Is the crown of thorns before you? Are there memories of cruel scorn? Of hunger and thirst and bitter cold That your belovèd have borne?

Had ye ever a son like Jesus To give to a death of pain? Did ever a son so cruelly die, But did he die in vain?

Have ye ever thought that all the hopes That make our earth-life fair, Were born in those three bitter days Of Mary's deep despair?

O mourning mothers, so many, Weeping in woe and pain, Think on the joy of Mary's heart In a Son that is risen again.

Have faith in a third-day morning, In a resurrection-hour; For what ye sow in weakness, He can raise again in power.

Have faith in the Lord of that thorny crown, In the Lord of the piercèd hand; For he reigneth now o'er earth and heaven, And his power who may withstand?

And the hopes that never on earth shall bloom, The sorrows forever new, Lay silently down at the feet of Him Who died and is risen for you.

VI

DAY DAWN

The dim gray dawn, upon the eastern hills, Brings back to light once more the cheerless scene; But oh! no morning in my Father's house Is dawning now, for there no night hath been.

Ten thousand thousand now, on Zion's hills, All robed in white, with palmy crowns, do stray, While I, an exile, far from fatherland, Still wandering, faint along the desert way.

O home! dear home! my own, my native home! O Father, friends! when shall I look on you? When shall these weary wanderings be o'er, And I be gathered back to stray no more?

O Thou, the brightness of whose gracious face These weary, longing eyes have never seen,-- By whose dear thought, for whose belovèd sake, My course, through toil and tears, I daily take,--

I think of thee when the myrrh-dropping morn Steps forth upon the purple eastern steep; I think of thee in the fair eventide, When the bright-sandaled stars their watches keep.

And trembling Hope, and fainting, sorrowing Love, On thy dear word for comfort doth rely; And clear-eyed Faith, with strong forereaching gaze, Beholds thee here, unseen, but ever nigh.

Walking in white with thee, she dimly sees, All beautiful, these lovely ones withdrawn, With whom my heart went upward, as they rose, Like morning stars, to light a coming dawn.

All sinless now, and crowned and glorified, Where'er thou movest move they still with thee, As erst, in sweet communion by thy side, Walked John and Mary in old Galilee.

But hush, my heart! 'Tis but a day or two Divides thee from that bright, immortal shore. Rise up! rise up! and gird thee for the race! Fast fly the hours, and all will soon be o'er.

Thou hast the new name written in thy soul; Thou hast the mystic stone He gives his own. Thy soul, made one with him, shall feel no more That she is walking on her path alone.

VII

WHEN I AWAKE I AM STILL WITH THEE

Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh, When the bird waketh and the shadows flee; Fairer than morning, lovelier than the daylight, Dawns the sweet consciousness, _I am with Thee_!

Alone with Thee, amid the mystic shadows, The solemn hush of nature newly born; Alone with Thee in breathless adoration, In the calm dew and freshness of the morn.

As in the dawning o'er the waveless ocean The image of the morning star doth rest, So in this stillness Thou beholdest only Thine image in the waters of my breast.

Still, still with Thee! as to each new-born morning A fresh and solemn splendor still is given, So doth the blessed consciousness, awaking, Breathe, each day, nearness unto Thee and heaven.

When sinks the soul, subdued by toil, to slumber, Its closing eye looks up to Thee in prayer; Sweet the repose beneath the wings o'ershading, But sweeter still to wake and find Thee there.

So shall it be at last, in that bright morning When the soul waketh and life's shadows flee; O in that hour, fairer than daylight dawning, Shall rise the glorious thought, _I am with Thee_!

PRESSED FLOWERS FROM ITALY

A DAY IN THE PAMFILI DORIA

Though the hills are cold and snowy, And the wind drives chill to-day, My heart goes back to a spring-time, Far, far in the past away.

And I see a quaint old city, Weary and worn and brown, Where the spring and the birds are so early, And the sun in such light goes down.

I remember that old-times villa, Where our afternoons went by, Where the suns of March flushed warmly, And spring was in earth and sky.

Out of the mouldering city, Mouldering, old, and gray, We sped, with a lightsome heart-thrill, For a sunny, gladsome day,--

For a revel of fresh spring verdure, For a race 'mid springing flowers, For a vision of plashing fountains, Of birds and blossoming bowers.

There were violet banks in the shadows, Violets white and blue; And a world of bright anemones, That over the terrace grew,--

Blue and orange and purple, Rosy and yellow and white, Rising in rainbow bubbles, Streaking the lawns with light.

And down from the old stone pine-trees, Those far-off islands of air, The birds are flinging the tidings Of a joyful revel up there.

And now for the grand old fountains, Tossing their silvery spray, Those fountains so quaint and so many, That are leaping and singing all day.

Those fountains of strange weird sculpture, With lichens and moss o'ergrown, Are they marble greening in moss-wreaths? Or moss-wreaths whitening to stone?

Down many a wild, dim pathway We ramble from morning till noon; We linger, unheeding the hours, Till evening comes all too soon.

And from out the ilex alleys, Where lengthening shadows play, We look on the dreamy Campagna, All glowing with setting day,--

All melting in bands of purple, In swathings and foldings of gold, In ribands of azure and lilac, Like a princely banner unrolled.

And the smoke of each distant cottage, And the flash of each villa white, Shines out with an opal glimmer, Like gems in a casket of light.

And the dome of old St. Peter's With a strange translucence glows, Like a mighty bubble of amethyst Floating in waves of rose.

In a trance of dreamy vagueness We, gazing and yearning, behold That city beheld by the prophet, Whose walls were transparent gold.

And, dropping all solemn and slowly, To hallow the softening spell, There falls on the dying twilight The Ave Maria bell.

With a mournful, motherly softness, With a weird and weary care, That strange and ancient city Seems calling the nations to prayer.

And the words that of old the angel To the mother of Jesus brought, Rise like a new evangel, To hallow the trance of our thought.

With the smoke of the evening incense, Our thoughts are ascending then To Mary, the mother of Jesus, To Jesus, the Master of men.

O city of prophets and martyrs, O shrines of the sainted dead, When, when shall the living day-spring Once more on your towers be spread?

When He who is meek and lowly Shall rule in those lordly halls, And shall stand and feed as a shepherd The flock which his mercy calls,--

O then to those noble churches, To picture and statue and gem, To the pageant of solemn worship, Shall the _meaning_ come back again.

And this strange and ancient city, In that reign of His truth and love, Shall _be_ what it _seems_ in the twilight, The type of that City above.

THE GARDENS OF THE VATICAN

Sweet fountains, plashing with a dreamy fall, And mosses green, and tremulous veils of fern, And banks of blowing cyclamen, and stars, Blue as the skies, of myrtle blossoming, The twilight shade of ilex overhead O'erbubbling with sweet song of nightingale, With walks of strange, weird stillness, leading on 'Mid sculptured fragments half to green moss gone, Or breaking forth amid the violet leaves With some white gleam of an old world gone by. Ah! strange, sweet quiet! wilderness of calm, Gardens of dreamy rest, I long to lay Beneath your shade the last long sigh, and say, Here is my home, my Lord, thy home and mine; And I, having searched the world with many a tear, At last have found thee and will stray no more. But vainly here I seek the Gardener That Mary saw. These lovely halls beyond, That airy, sky-like dome, that lofty fane, Is as a palace whence the king is gone And taken all the sweetness with himself. Turn again, Jesus, and possess thine own! Come to thy temple once more as of old! Drive forth the money-changers, let it be A house of prayer for nations. Even so, Amen! Amen!

ST. PETER'S CHURCH

HOLY WEEK, APRIL, 1860

O fairest mansion of a Father's love, Harmonious! hospitable! with thine arms Outspread to all, thy fountains ever full, And, fair as heaven, thy misty, sky-like dome Hung like the firmament with circling sweep Above the constellated golden lamps That burn forever round the holy tomb. Most meet art thou to be the Father's house, The house of prayer for nations. Come the time When thou shalt be so! when a liberty, Wide as thine arms, high as thy lofty dome, Shall be proclaimed, by thy loud singing choirs, Like voice of many waters! Then the Lord Shall come into his temple, and make pure The sons of Levi; then, as once of old, The blind shall see, the lame leap as an hart, And to the poor the Gospel shall be preached, And Easter's silver-sounding trumpets tell, "The Lord is risen indeed," to die no more. Hasten it in its time. Amen! Amen!

THE MISERERE

Not of the earth that music! all things fade; Vanish the pictured walls! and, one by one, The starry candles silently expire!

And now, O Jesus! round that silent cross A moment's pause, a hush as of the grave. Now rises slow a silver mist of sound, And all the heavens break out in drops of grief; A rain of sobbing sweetness, swelling, dying, Voice into voice inweaving with sweet throbs, And fluttering pulses of impassioned moan,-- Veiled voices, in whose wailing there is awe, And mysteries of love and agony, A yearning anguish of celestial souls, A shiver as of wings trembling the air, As if God's shining doves, his spotless birds, Wailed with a nightingale's heart-break of grief, In this their starless night, when for our sins Their sun, their life, their love, hangs darkly there, Like a slain lamb, bleeding his life away!