ear.

With it, they light indeed their fires within us still; but they are cooled and well-nigh quenched in the joy of reconciliation and the floods of living sympathy. Wherever there is a true thirst for God and that thirst is not in vain, hell itself is fresh with waterbrooks, and so bursts into green as to be hell no more.

And as it is with the peace, so is it with the power, of the spirit of awakened love. We are helpless and paralysed without it. The mere regret for past and irrevocable wrong only gnaws the mind with unproductive self-contempt, or works upon a feeble prudence that cannot lift itself from its own flat and even true shame and remorse, while only retrospective and mellowed by no personal trust and present sympathy, rather prostrate than inspire the soul. They are the needful weakness by which we are brought low and made clear, in preparation for the access of a higher strength. It is only in the guise of a deep love that that higher strength enters to possess us. It is only when the force of conscience ceases to be a propulsion in the dark, and stands before us transfigured with the glory of a Divine form,-only when it is discovered to be no mere part of ourselves, but the immediate real presence of the Holiest of all, that we are touched and caught up by its inspiration. Then it wins to itself the transcending power of a personal affection; and the spiritual impulse and the deepest love fall into coalescence. Instead of distant obedience arises near communion :

in place of a precarious and trembling will, toiling on the dust, we find the transporting wing of aspiration, and leave detaining weights behind. As for mere human strength and self-reliance, it cannot hold through this high race. Not long shall even young resolve press on without being weary; and the youthful spirits too often utterly fall. But they that, with trustful love," wait upon the Lord, shall renew their strength"; "they shall mount up on wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and shall not faint.”

XVIII.

Life to the Children of the Prophets.

ACTS iii. 25.

"Ye are the children of the prophets."

Ir is an old problem, to determine the characters which most clearly distinguish man from the other tribes that share with him the occupancy of this world. I will venture to add one to the many answers it has received: he can tell what o'clock it is. His nature indeed has few more discriminating symbols than that small instrument, the watch. Other creatures travel down the path of time but he alone can count the steps. They too are liable to season and to change: but he only can mark the cycle and anticipate the end. They also bear within them the vestige of the past, and can dream again of some old sight or sound: but in him alone, from knowledge of its source, is it ripened into memory. They belong to duration : but duration rather belongs to him; not indeed to change its empty form, but to mark its divisions, to glorify its spirit, and determine its contents.

He would have no name by which to describe the present moment, were not the past and the future simultaneously before his thought. It is a high prerogative,— this meeting of the three elements in his mind at once: nor does he often appear to me in closer affinity to the Divine nature, than when I hear the church-clock beneath the midnight skies,-man's hour-bell striking on the ear, and watch God's time-piece of stars gliding before the eye.

Yet how little true to this prerogative does he practically seem! If you place him before you in idea, as the only known being, save God, who can measure the flow of time, and discern the relation of his Now to a heretofore and a hereafter; you think his position august and sublime, and expect a nature widened and calmed by that breadth of duration which seems to claim him. But if you turn from his chronometer to himself, if you look for the past and the future in his own mind, extending his sympathy and tranquillizing his passions, the solemnity of your expectation is sadly disappointed: you see almost the same slavery to the moment, the same blindness to all beyond, as in creatures who are aware of nothing else. He seems delivered over from instant to instant, like a helpless tradition moulded by small pressures of the time, and losing permanent truth at every point. He burns away with self-consuming care in the running focus of the present, fusing down his life into drops

that no man cares to gather; and shows nothing of that large lustre of the soul which resembles the spacious and unwasting light of electric skies. Nay, his very privilege of seeing fore and aft is corrupted by him into a means of heating up, instead of cooling down, the interest of the moment: his dexterity, his experience, his power of anticipation, are freely applied to deepen his immediate stake, and make the instant game more desperately engaging to his passions; but not to give the quiet heart and steady hand of one who frequents it only as the gymnastic of a divine skill, and is undazzled by its showy prize. Instead of abating the vehemence of his short-sighted wishes by the sense of larger and more enduring good, he directly imports all the resources of memory and the fervours of hope into his momentary desire, and thus doubles his slavery instead of attaining his freedom.

This habit of living for the moment is, even in its best forms, narrowing to the mind and withering to the heart. It cannot coexist with the sense of God upon the soul. It makes the difference between the blindness of passion and the long sight of affection,-between the evanescent haste of impulse and the permanent aspiration of enthusiasm,-between the heats of the natural and the intensity of the spiritual man. This is readily

admitted in the case of one who lives for immediate pleasure. The common feeling of mankind looks with contemptuous pity at his inability to resist the