ills of life are not here on their own account, but are as a divine challenge and godlike wrestling in the night with our too reluctant wills: and since, thus regarded, they are truly evil no more, let us embrace the conflict manfully, and fear no defeat to any faithful will. When all is well with us in this world, let us not forget that its enjoyments also are not here on their own account: the cup is not to be tossed off in careless draughts. They too stand in relation to the affections and character of soul, and thence derive their truest worth: it were sin to take them to our selfish sensibilities alone; and they must warm us with a grateful and a generous mind, more trustful in the love of God, more prompt with a true pity for man. And when we best and most strenuously follow the obligations of our career, we can permit no flutter of self-gratulation to disturb the quiet meekness of the heart. For only look up on that which we dare to hope, and how are our mightiest achievements dwarfed. All insufficient in themselves,poor spellings-out of the mere alphabet of eternal wisdom,they are but signs of willing pupilage,— the upturned look of a disciple sitting at the feet. As symbols of faith and service, God will be graciously pleased to accept them from us; and discern in them the early essays of a soul that shall assume at length dimensions more divine.

XVII.

THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH.

EPHESIANS III. 14. 15.

OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST,-OF WHOM THE WHOLE FAMILY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH IS NAMED.

JESUS was never so much one with his disciples, as when he was no longer with them: they were never so widely severed from him, as when, with unawakened and dim-discerning heart, they lingered around him, with eyes so holden that they did not know him. The nearest in person may clearly be the furthest in soul; they may eat at the same table, and morning and night exchange the greeting and the parting look, yet each remain outside the spirit of the other, severed even by an impassable chasm, to which the earth's diameter would be less than an arm's length. But where the inner being, rather than the mere outer, has been passed together, and we have found in some

fraternal heart the appointed confessional for the doubts, and strife, and sorrowful resolves of our existence, no amount of land or water can break the mutual affiliation: the reciprocation of pity and of trust, the placid memories, the joint courage to bear well the solemn weight of life, which enrich a present love, may consecrate the absent too. Nay, distance may even set a human life in truer and more affectionate aspect before us, by stripping off its trivialities, and bringing out its essential features, and urging our thought to conceive it as a whole from its beginning to its close and in the want of any lighter union, we fold ourselves in the embrace of the same divine laws, and compassion for the same mortal lot.

With the boldness of a true and inspired nature, the apostle Paul gives an immeasurable extension to this thought; and speaks, with incidental ease, of one "family," distributed between heaven and earth. There is, it seems, a domesticity that cannot be absorbed by the interval between two spheres of being;-a love that cannot be lost amid the immensity, but finds the surest track across the void;-a home-affinity that penetrates the skies, and enters as the morning or the evening guest. And it is Jesus of Nazareth who has effected this ;-has entered under the same house

hold name, and formed into the same class, the dwellers above and those beneath. Spirits there, and spirits here, are gathered by him into one group; and where before was saddest exile, he has made a blest fraternity. Let us observe in what instances, and by what means, the spirit of Christ draws into one circle the members of some human society separated else by hopeless distance.

Members of the same home cannot dwell together, without either the memory or the expectation of some mutual and mortal farewell. Families are for ever forming, for ever breaking up; and every stroke of the pendulum carries the parting agony through fifty homes. There is no one of mature affections from whose arms some blessing of the heart,-parent, sister, child,-has not died away, and slipped, not as once into extinction, but (chief thanks to Messiah's name) into eternity. All we who dwell in this visible scene. can think of kindred souls that have vanished from us into the invisible. These, in the first place, does Jesus keep dwelling near our hearts; making still one family of those in heaven and those on earth.

This he would do, if by no other means, by the prospect he has opened, of actual restoration. Hopeless grief for the dead, in being passionate, is tempted to be faithless too: for, it has no

remedy but in suffering remembrance to fade away, and employing the gaudy colours of the present to paint over the sacred shadows of the past. On the other hand, the most distant promise of a renewed embrace is sufficient to keep alive an unforgetful love. Come where and when it may, after years or ages, in the nearest or the furthest regions of God's universe, it passes across our minds the vision of reunion: it opens a niche in the crypt of the affections, where the images of household memory may stand, and gaze with placid look at the homage of our sorrow, till they light up again with life, and fall into our arms once more. It matters little at what point in the perspective of the future the separation enforced by death is thought to cease. Faith and Love are careless time-keepers: they have a wide and liberal eye for distance and duration : and while they can whisper to each other the words 'Meet again,' they can watch and toil with wondrous patience,— with spirit fresh and true, and, amid its most grievous loneliness, unbereft of one good sympathy. And since the grave can bury no affections now, but only the mortal and familiar shape of their object; death has changed its whole aspect and relation to us and we may regard it, not with passionate hate, but with quiet reverence. It is a divine message from above, not an invasion