assuaged; and Time lays his healing hand on the wounds of death. And again sickness may be as the fire purging the gold; and when we think of the death of the righteous, we hardly dare to wish them back again. In all these things there may be a soul of goodness in things evil. But oh, the ravages of sin! there is mischief, and unmingled mischief, there. It is told of Queen Blanche of Navarre, mother of St. Louis of France, that she often said she would rather see her son a corpse at her feet, than know that he had committed a deadly sin. It is told of another sad queen, Queen Marie Antoinette of France, that to her the sorrow which, like Aaron's rod, swallowed up all other sorrows, was to know what vile hands would have the training of her princely boy. But is that sorrow of

I "This fear it was—a fear like this I have often thoughtwhich must among her other woes have been the Aaron-woe that swallowed up all the rest to the unhappy Marie Antoinette. This must have been the sting of death to her maternal heart, the grief paramount, the crowning grief,-the thought, namely, that her royal boy would not be dismissed from the honours of royalty to peace and humble innocence; but that his fair cheek would be ravaged by vice as well as by sorrow; that he would

watching the degeneracy of a bright life, the corruption of an innocent spirit,-is it a strange, abnormal sorrow? Has no parent among you had to send a child to start for life in some great school, or in some great city, and watched with an aching heart "the fine gradations of vice or intemperance by which the clear-browed boy has grown into the sullen, troubled, dissatisfied youth"? Would the story of the Prodigal have touched as it has touched the heart of the world if it were rare? Does the world offer at this moment an exhilarating spectacle? Wars costing so many precious lives; sedition trying to rear its head; reckless, murderous conspiracies; widespread distress; the sinfulness of waste; the baseness of dishonesty; the adulteration of food; selfish luxury; mad greed of gain; houses where, because of bad passions, the fires of hell mix with the hearth; the

be tempted into brutal orgies and every mode of moral pollution, until, like poor Constance with her young Arthur, but for a sadder reason, even if it were possible that the royal mother should see her son in the courts of heaven, she would not know again one so fearfully transfigured."-DE QUINCEY, Autobiog. Sketches.

reeling army of drunkards; the miserable victims of man's most degraded selfishness doomed by thousands to loathly lives and loathlier deaths; rancours in the political world, rancours yet more deadly in the socalled religious world; slander, and lies, and libels never more infamously rampant; the hearts of good men made sad which God hath not made sad; men hateful and hating one another;—is it altogether a glad spectacle, a happy spectacle? And all this too had Jesus seen. He had seen the petty tyranny of the Herods. He had seen angry and unscrupulous religionists-hating each other for differences of opinion, dealing in plausible disparagements and base insinuations, scheming and plotting to veil deadly hatreds under decent forms. He had seen Pharisees raging at Sadducees, and Sadducees sneering at Pharisees, and both alike conspiring, in the interests of a sham religion, to murder Him; and He had seen the riot of the prodigal, and the anguish of the adulteress; and the shame

of the publican had moved his compassion; and the tears of the penitent harlot had fallen on His feet.-And once more, I ask, can you wonder if, as Jesus thus looked on the world of Sickness, the world of Death, the world of Sin, He looked up to Heaven, and sighed ?

5. But why, my brethren, have I thus set before you this sad picture as it is? Not, be assured, with no object, although I think that the mere recognition of such facts is most needful sometimes for our callous selfish

ness and fastidious sensibility. It is good, it is right, to startle, if possible, the hard indifference of that vulgar English comfort and domesticity, which does nothing, and gives so shamefully little, for the sorrow around it. And the reason why it is right and useful is because there is a remedy for many of those evils; and the sigh for all the misery around us is but the passing expression of a sympathy which may find instant relief in beneficent action. If there were no remedy for any of these things, to sigh would be a useless

sentimentality. Scripture has nothing but rough scorn for mere fantastic melancholy. Human sorrow is a field too sacred to be abandoned to fine people,

"The sluggard Pity's vision-weaving tribe,

Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched,
Nursing, in some delicious solitude,

Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies."

No! if Scripture ever forces us, amid our idle chorus, to pause and listen to the sad music of humanity, it is only that it may stir us up the next moment as with a trumpet-blast to active service. In one sense, indeed, there is no remedy against these disturbing elements in the life of man; no armour against fate. No toil of ours can make of this world a safe or perfect place. It is not the hand of man that can ever wipe all tears from off all faces. This fatal flaw in the world that now is, has been recognised by the earliest ages of mankind. It is the Tree of the knowledge of evil which casts its dark shadow even in the Paradise of God. The oldest Epics recognised the