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man by gifts whose hand he knows not of. Rather feed thyself with vilest weed than make thyself dependent on other human beings. Seek not greedily after power and pre-eminence in the world. Spend not thy time among people who speak ill of their brother-man. Be not as the fly that is always seeking sick and wounded places. Dare not to rejoice when thine enemy comes to the ground, but give him food when he hungers. Purge thy soul from angry passion, that inheritance of fools. Love the society of wise men, and strive to know more and more of the ways and the works of thy Creator.

ELDOM can a heart be lonely,

If it seek a lonelier still

Self-forgetting, seeking only
Emptier cups of love to fill.

ELIAZAR BEN ISAAC,
(XI. Century).

XX.

The Aspiration of Work.

HIGH

Blessed is the man whose strength is in Thee, O God, because Thy ways are in his heart.

He

goes from strength to strength till he appears before God in Zion.-Psalm lxxxiv. 5, 7.

IGH hearts are never long without hearing some new call, some distant clarion of God, even in their dreams; and soon they are observed to break up

the camp of ease, and start on some fresh march of faithful service. And, looking higher still, we find those who never wait till their moral work accumulates, and who reward resolution with no rest; with whom, therefore, the alternation is instantaneous and constant; who do the good only to see the better, and see the better only to achieve it; who are too meek for transport, too faithful for remorse, too earnest for repose; whose worship is action, and whose action ceaseless aspiration.

R

EST not! Life is sweeping by,

Go and dare before you die;

Something mighty and sublime
Leave behind to conquer time;
Glorious 't is to live for aye
When these forms have passed away.

J. MARTINEAU.

XXI.

Death.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil, for Thou, O God, art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they shall comfort me.— Psalm xxiii. 4.

God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.-Psalm lxxiii.

THIS life is but the fore-court of the Palace above;

prepare thyself so that thy soul enter worthily

the Palace.

CHAPTERS OF THE JEWISH FATHERS.

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INCE nature's works be good and death doth serve

As nature's work, why should we fear to die? Since fear is vain but when it may preserve,

Why should we fear that which we cannot fly? Fear is more pain than is the pain it fears

Disarming human minds of native weight; While each conceit an ugly figure bears

Which were not evil, well viewed in reason's light.
Our owly eyes, which dimmed with fashion be,

Can scarce discern the dawn of coming day,
Let them be cleared and now begin to see,
Our life is but a step in dusty way.
Then let us hold the bliss of peaceful mind,
Since this we feel, great loss we cannot find.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

XXII.

Immortality.

I shall not die, but live and declare the works of the Lord.-Psalm cxviii. 17.

J

FEEL in myself the future life. I am like a forest which has been more than once cut down. The new shoots are stronger and livelier than ever: I am rising, I know, toward the sky. The sunshine is on my head. The earth gives me its generous sap, but heaven lights me with the reflection of unknown worlds. You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of bodily

powers. Why, then, is my soul the more luminous. when my bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is on my head, and eternal spring is in my heart. There I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets, and the roses as at twenty years. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple. It is a fairy tale, and it is history. For half a century I have been writing my thoughts in prose and verse: history, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song,-I have tried all. But I feel I have not said the thousandth

part of what is in me. When I go down to the grave, I can say, like so many others, "I have finished my day's work; but I cannot say, "I have finished my life.” My day's work will begin again the next morning. The tomb is not a blind alley: it is a thoroughfare. It closes on the twilight to open with the dawn. I improve every hour because I love this world as my fatherland, and because the truth compels me. My work is only a beginning. My monument is hardly above its foundations. I would be glad to see it mounting and mounting forever. The thirst for the infinite proves infinity.

ROM night to light,
From doubt to sight,

The soul, God's breath,
Is led by death.

VICTOR HUGO.

XXIII.

ΝΟ

Intimations of Immortality.

And it shall be when Thou art come hither to the city that thou shalt meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery and a tabret, and a pipe and a harp before them, and they shall prophesy. And the Spirit of the Lord shall come upon thee and thou shalt prophesy with them and shalt be turned into another man.-I. Samuel x. 5. 6.

KNOW that what Samuel announced to Saul was not a miraculous occurrence which happened to him only because he was chosen to become a prince and ruler of his people. Everyone who met a prophet and heard him prophesy, experienced an inward change so deep that he appeared like another man; a new spirit was awakened in him; he felt himself raised beyond his ordinary condition by the clearness of his thoughts, by his yearning after still greater insight, whilst his humanity and strength of self-renunciation were increased. In this ecstatic state he saw the light and felt the exaltation of the more perfect life to come; for what else can we expect of such a life but that the soul, freed from the body and its senses, glories in its Divine origin, and rejoices in the perception of the world of spirits and the communion with the Eternal One. The prophets were to our forefathers the living witnesses, the actual proofs, of the independence of the soul from the destiny of the body. They had direct experience of that

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