pass mere beauty of complexion, feature or form, as the diamond surpasses the paste. And never forget, that in the sight of God "a meek and quiet spirit" is of great price; that the spirit of experimental Christianity, which brings out into higher development every element of female loveliness, and throws over the entire character its sweetest grace, is its truest charm.

"For beauty alone ne'er conferred

Such a charm as religion has lent,

And the cheek of a belle never glowed

With a smile like the smile of content."

Indeed, the influence of the service of God, ex- . panding the intellect, purifying and directing the moral nature, leading to all the sweet charities of benevolence, flings a halo of glory around womanhood now, and will gem her with immortal beauty, in the better world. Well has it been

said

"What is woman, what her smile,
Her look of love, her eyes of light?

What is she if she in her heart deride

The blessed Saviour? Love may write his
Name upon her marble brow,

Or linger in her curls of jet,

The light spring flower may scarcely bend
Beneath her step; and yet, and yet,

Without this choicest grace,

She is a lighter thing than vanity."

I notice in conclusion, the circumstances connected with her death. In mercy, her life was lengthened out, an hundred and twenty-seven years.

What

a ripe old age! And if she retained, as we have seen, enough of beauty at the age of ninety, to attract the admiration of a king, it is reasonable to suppose, that her mature matronhood was blessed with health and happiness. She lived to see her son-her Isaac, a pious, noble man. She lived to see how wrong she had done, in distrusting the promise of a covenant-fulfilling God, and have her own piety deepened by experience, until after a century and quarter had passed by her, she stood on the earthly harvest field, like a shock of corn fully ripe unto the harvest. If her day at times had been dark, at evening time it was light. Chastened by discipline, and strengthened by trial, she was made meet for the heavenly inheritance. Her work was

done. Her last hour came. Her husband was away from home-he saw not her dying glance-he heard not her dying words. This may have caused the gathering shades to assume for a moment a darker hue, but the glory beyond, bursting forth out of an opening heaven, changed them all to brightness, while through them she saw the angel of the corenant waiting to receive her, and angel bands ready to sing the "welcome home." At Kirjatharba, in the lovely vale of Hebron, her cherished home, Death came to her, as a dark-robed messenger with soft and quiet tread, and calmly trusting in her God, she ascended from that earthly to the heavenly Canaan, that deathless clime, where

"The soul, of origin divine,

God's glorious image, freed from clay,
In heaven's oternal sphere shall shine,
A star of day!"

Her funeral is the first one, on the record of the world's history. Her devoted husband, hearing the sad intelligence, hastened home, and bedewed her cold remains with his tears while Isaac, now motherless, wept as every son ought to weep, who loses a mother, for who can love us as our mother; who can feel for us, as she who bore us? Of the children of Heth, Abraham bought the cave of Macpelah, and there amid its sepulchral silence and gloom, he laid the remains of his noble, devoted Sarah, who from early maidenhood to old age, had been true to him; his pious, deferential, loving wife; whose beauty had been the ornament of his tent whose piety had strengthened his faith : whose sweet companionship had cheered his weary wanderings: whose cheerful coöperation had lightened his toils, and whose angel presence had been the sun of his life. We may conceive of him as exclaiming, when he took his farewell of her corpse

"Calm on the bosom of thy God,

Fair spirit! rest thee now;

Even while with us thy footsteps trod,

His seal was on thy brow.

Dust to its narrow house beneath,

Soul to its place on high !

They that have seen thy look in death,

No more may fear to die."

Now, my friend, let me urge you to remember and imitate her piety, her loving respect for her husband, her watchcare over her son, her womanly and pious estimate of what the world esteems so highly. And as she was prepared for the great change the change of worlds-so may'st thou

"Sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."

REBECCA,

The Managing Woman.

Gen. 27: 13. "Upon me be thy curse my son."

FIDELITY to truth is a characteristic of the Bible; especially is this so of its biographies. In the record of the lives of even prominent religious men and women, we have faithfully detailed not only their excellencies but their deficiencies; not only their virtuous but vicious conduct; not only their strong and praiseworthy traits of character, but also their weak and blameworthy ones. You can but feel, as you read these records, that they are true to nature -true to human nature-true to what you know by your own experience and observation, fallen human nature to be. You read of heroic men, philanthropic men, pious men; you read of many good women, noble women, pious women, but each and all of them you find to have possessed the infirmities of fallen humanity; and the divine records of all other characters plainly show them to have been