some hope that he might next be enlightened; but when the earnest youth became a monk, you would have said, Farewell, light! farewell, all hope of the gospel! And yet Luther's entombment in the Erfurth convert was to be the resurrection of apostolical religion. In the heart of that little incident God had set the Reformation. When a king rose in Egypt who knew not Joseph, and who hated and tormented the Hebrews, you would have said, There's an end of the old promise. This order to exterminate the Hebrew children will soon annihilate Abraham's family. And any Jew who had been gathered to his fathers at the time they were slaying all the male children, would have been apt to die despairing of his nation's prospects. And yet that murderous edict was to be the deliverance of Israel. In the heart of that despot's decree God had set the exodus. And to the sublime theology of Solomon, the only addition we would make is that Evangelic supplement: "All things work together for good to them that love God; to them which are the called according to his purpose." Their path is thickly strewn with incidents. Of these, some are for the present not joyous but grievous: nevertheless in their heart God hath set the peaceable fruits of righteousness. They are seeds with a thorny husk, and they hurt the pilgrim's naked feet; but when next he passes that way, or when Christiana with her children follows him, they have germinated into bright flowers or cool overshadowing trees. And they will not perish. The incidents along the believer's path are seeds of influence, scattered by the hand of God. And sanctification of some sort is the germ which he has set in the heart of every one of them. Nor can they die till they have thus developed. They cannot perish and pass away till the Christian has set in his heart the lesson which God has set in theirs. The works of God are distinguished by opportune

season.

ness of development and precision of purpose. There is a season for each of them, and each comes in its All of them have a function to fulfil, and they fulfil it. To which, verse 14, the preacher adds that they are all of their kind consummate-so perfect that no improvement can be made, and, left to themselves, they will be perpetual. "I know that whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever; nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it." How true is this regarding God's greatest work, redemption! What more could he have done to make it a great salvation than what he has already done? or what feature of the glorious plan could we afford to want? And now that he has himself pronounced it a "finished" work, what is there that man can put to it ?-what is there he dare take from it? And in doing it, he has done it "for ever." The merits of Immanuel are as mighty now as they were on the day of Pentecost. Jesus is as able to save us if we come unto God by him now, as he was to save Zaccheus, and "Legion," and Mary Magdalene. It is into the same bright heaven that these merits and that mercy will take us as that into which the whiterobed company have already gone; and by a process as swift as that which translated the dying thief, these merits could transport any sinner amongst us, from the verge of perdition to Paradise.

One final reflection from the whole passage. Some of you, my friends, may read the description of mortality here recorded, and you may give a vehement assent to its truth. "Yes, it is all a masquerade of the same everlasting events wearing new vizors; it is all mutation without novelty, and change without real variety. The world itself is a gourd, whose root the worm is already gnawing-a palace, whose quicksand basis the flood is already sapping.

"What is this passing scene?

A peevish April day!

A little sun, a little rain,

And then night sweeps along the plain,
And all things fade away.'

So be it. But if so, how should it endear that state where all is perfection, and all is permanence! To everything "under heaven" there is a fixed but a fleeting season; but to those who are in heaven the moments are not thus precarious, nor the seasons thus short. And still better, there are many of the things for which there is a "time" on earth, for which there is no time there. To those who are born into that better country there is no time to "die." Those that are "planted" in God's house on high, shall never be "plucked up," but shall flourish there for ever. There, there is nothing to hurt nor to destroy, but perpetual "health," and lasting as eternity. There, the walls of strong salvation shall never be "broken down." There, there is no time to weep; for sorrow and sighing are for ever fled away: no "time to mourn;" for, when they left this vale of tears the days of their mourning ended. There, it is all a time of "peace," and all “ a time to love." There, monuments are never defaced nor overthrown; for those who are pillars in the temple above, with the new name written on them, shall go out no more. There, in the sanctity of the all-superseding relationship, there will be no severance; but those friends of earth, who have been joined again in the bonds of angelhood, will never need to give the parting embrace; for they shall be ever with one another, and ever with the Lord.*

ઃઃ

* Extracted from "The Royal Preacher :" Lectures on Ecclesiastes. By James Hamilton, D.D., F.L.S. London: Nisbet and Co.

THE GRAVE.

I STOOD within the grave's o'ershadowing vault;
Gloomy and damp, it stretch'd its vast domain;
Shades were its boundary, for my strain'd
For other limits to its width in vain.

eye sought

Faint from the entrance came a daylight ray,
And distant sound of living men and things;
This, in the encount'ring darkness pass'd away,-
That, took the tone in which a mourner sings.

I lit a torch at a sepulchral lamp,

Which shot a thread of light amid the gloom,
And feebly burning 'gainst the rolling damp,
I bore it through the regions of the tomb.

Around me stretch'd the slumbers of the dead,
Whereof the silence ached upon mine ear;
More and more noiseless did I note my tread,
And yet its echoes chill'd my heart with fear.

The former men, of every age and place,
From all their wand'rings gather'd, round me lay;
The dust of wither'd empires did I trace,
And stood 'mid generations pass'd away.

I saw whole cities, that in flood or fire,
Or famine, or the plague, gave up their breath;
Whole armies, whom a day beheld expire,
Swept by ten thousands to the arms of death.

I saw the Old World's white and wave-swept bones,
A giant heap of creatures that had been;

Far and confused, the broken skeletons

Lay strewn beyond mine eye's remotest ken.

Death's various shrines-the urn, the stone, the lamp,
Were scatter'd round confused amid the dead;
Symbols and types were mould'ring in the damp,
Their shapes were wanting, and their meaning fled.

Unspoken tongues, perchance in praise or woe,
Were chronicled on tablets Time had swept;
And deep were half their letters hid below

The thick, small dust of those they once had wept.

No hand was here to wipe the dust away;
No reader of the writing traced beneath;
No spirit sitting by its form of clay;

No sigh nor sound from all the heaps of death.

One place alone had ceased to hold its prey;
A form had pressed it, and was there no more;
The garments of the grave beside it lay,
Where once they wrapp'd HIм on the rocky floor.

He only with returning footsteps broke

Th' eternal calm with which the tomb was bound;
Among the sleeping dead alone He woke,

And bless'd with outstretch'd hands the host around.

Well is it that such blessing hovers here,
To soothe each sad survivor of the throng
Who haunt the portals of the solemn sphere,
And pour their woe the loaded air along.

They to the verge have follow'd what they love,
And on th' insuperable threshold stand;
With cherish'd names its speechless calm reprove,
And stretch in the abyss their ungrasp'd hands.

But vainly there they seek their soul's relief,
And of the obdurate grave its prey implore,
Till Death itself shall medicine their grief,
Closing their eyes by those they met before.

All that have died, the earth's whole race, repose
Where Death collects his treasures, heap on heap;
O'er each one's busy day the night-shades close;
Its actors, sufferers, schools, kings, armies-sleep.

MRS. CLIVE.