than the man exclaims, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.

Once raised to this great insight, he perceives that God creates, not destroys, and that, if he excites hope, he will certainly fulfil it. The family, wherein our hopes and our affections spring up and grow or wither, suggests to us the analogies, perhaps we may say the principles themselves, of his relations to us, of the discipline by which he teaches and trains us. The parental element is pure love; but love seeks ever to bless and improve, never to curse and hurt. The child wants many things which older wisdom knows would destroy, or at least injure him. Love itself takes them away, though the child is grieved or made angry. The child declines also quite as many things which the parent knows he needs; and the higher wisdom does not refuse to give what is unwelcome. So the Universal Father, against the will and the passions and the appetites of his children, gives and withholds according to his love, not their choice, and blesses them in spite of themselves. Only the deed which he empowers us to perform, and which so we may distort to wrong, can be really, essentially, wholly evil; and when we have sinned, even then his love at once gathers about us all holy influences, that he may redeem and save and bless us, even from

our chosen evil seeking to derive means of exalting us to higher rectitude. And as relations dissolve, and hopes full of vain dreams, shadows of dreams, lose themselves in mid-air, we need not complain; suffer him to teach us with effect that only he is true Father; that only heaven is home; that only the communion of pure souls is the enduring family; and that all our losses are suggestions of the immortal boon which nothing but our own misdeed can turn to evil.

What, then, if friends dearest to us of all go far from us, and we seldom or never meet them more? Beyond the human motives which have wrought the separations, there is a Divine influence, an infinite love, an unsearchable wisdom, which guides them all, and shapes them to purposes beyond our sight. What if they pass for ever from us? There is no death. There is no hate. The Father loveth them and loveth us. And to him they live, as to him we live. Evermore he sendeth forth his spirit to create new capacities of good, to fill such as already exist, and through sorrows no less than joys, through dissolution no less than connection, through death as well as life, to waken and accomplish the hope of man.

I have shrunk from the endeavor to put into words what may be the feelings and aspirations of the heart in such hours. Yet are there no

seasons in life wherein the feelings are more deeply touched to religious issues, when the aspirations, even if silent, are more free and sincere, toward God and heaven. So I could not decline to translate them into a few simple words:

O Lord, thou gavest; help us to thank thee for the gift. O Lord, thou hast taken away; help us still to say, Blessed be the name of the Lord! Our hearts are touched with the grief, which we confess thy providence to have called forth within them; suffer us never to think of thee as afflicting us willingly, as grieving thy children needlessly, as taking pleasure in our sorrows. Doubtless thou art our Father! We dwell amidst darkness; thou art Light. We see but the dim vision of thy glory; thou seest all, and what is dim to us is clearer than day to thee. Let us lay our hands upon our lips; let us prostrate ourselves in silence before thee; let us trust thy love; thou doest all things well. O God, whose spirit encircleth the heavens and the earth, and flows through all souls, strengthen us to faith in thy power, so mighty to all effects; in thy wisdom, so full, so unsearchable, so perfect; in thy love, for love thou art, and Father of all. We have blessed thee, Father, for thy mercies, when all was glad around us: enable us to bless thee now, when sorrow comes and

joy is dissolved in grief. Thy mercies can never fail. Be thou, Lord, our solace, our trust, our hope. From the earth we look to thy heaven ; from this realm of death, to thee, Source of eternal life. Thy peace be with us.

Leave us never for an instant to sorrow without hope. Thine is our Lord Jesus Christ, thy beloved Son, thy benignant Image, the Messenger of thy truth. We bless thee for his immortality, for his resurrection out of the darkness and the sepulchre; for his word, Because I live, ye shall live also; for his ascension to thy right hand, and our trust in him to go up and dwell with thee, his Father and our Father. Enable us thus to feel that death has indeed passed for ever away; that all is now life in thee. Father, we have lost nothing. Thine own it is which thou hast taken back to thee; - thine own, the life withdrawn from us, dwelling still amidst the spheres of thy boundless creation. And thine own are we who weep on earth, whom thou wilt call in the fitting hour. Make us ever ready to hear and obey thy voice, O Lord! Blessed be thou, God, even thou, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hast begotten us unto a living hope by the resurrection of thy Son unto an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. Blessed be thou, now and for ever. Amen.

CHAPTER II.

FRIENDSHIP.

THE attachments of the family are not more natural in reality than those of friendship. Affection may be called indeed the essence of humanity. If we begin with the central attraction, and follow it out, the course is that already presented from marriage through parentage and childhood into the fraternal circle. If we begin with the affection which is developed earliest in time, and follow from infancy the course to maturity, the filial is the first appearing in the soul, then the fraternal, afterward the connubial, then the parental. But whichever view we take of the domestic series, there is yet another attachment than it gives us, succeeding in time the filial and fraternal, and coexisting with the later developments of love, not to disturb them, but to grow by their side as distinct and yet kindred.

The child goes out from the family, and meets a second, it matters little whether like or unlike. The main thing is, that they are two persons chancing to come together, and