gone astray in the wilderness and fallen among thorns. He is the lost penny, stamped with the image of a great king, but which has been trodden in the dust till scarce a trace of the august features can any longer be discerned.1 And yet the immortal life from God, which is in me, is merely overpowered by death, but not extinguished. A resurrection-germ survives amid the fatal slumber, and shoots and labours towards the sun. I am aware that evil has the might within me, but I am also aware that to good belongs the right. I have read how in the land of Japan there is both a temporal and a spiritual emperor, and that the former possesses all the power, but is every year obliged to pay homage to the latter. There is the same relation between my sinful Adam and that divine image which even the Fall has not wholly obliterated from the soul of man.2

So yearns the prodigal and all that is within him after that archetypal and supremely perfect Son, above whose head the heavens were once opened, and the voice exclaimed, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." For Him he pants, to loose his bonds, and restore afresh the features of the divine likeness. I still retain within me, like a faint remembrance, a truth of God, which the apostle says was also "manifest in" the heathen, but was by them "held in unrighteousness;" but I am like one who dreams, and the truth does not take distinct shape before my eyes. We often say we know a name although at the moment we cannot call it to mind; but let another come and utter the long-forgotten word and we recognise it at once. The same happens to us with respect to that truth from God in which we live, and move, and have our being, but which we are unable to recall. He who lay in the Father's bosom has uttered the word of it, and it too we recognise. Since then we see, what we never saw before, that we are prodigal sons; but at the same time we see the way which leads to our home.

1 Luke, xv. 8.

2 James, iii. 9.

3 Rom. i. 18, 32.

THE SOUL.

My God and Father! I pant after Thee, and can no longer be satisfied with anything else. Thou art the source of my being, and, consequently, its end and aim. Wilt Thou know me again, all disfigured as I am?

THE LORD.

Make Christ thy robe, and then thou shalt be known,

If thou art His, for mine I will thee own.

Thy high descent no heritage bestows;
He is my son, whose soul my image shows.

2.

Our Bags are few and full of Trouble.

The roses grow on thorns, say I,
The thorns on roses, you reply;
And to determine which has hit

The truth will tax a subtle wit;
Though sure it makes a difference vast,

Which word stands first and which comes last.

ECCLUS. xl. 1-4. "Great travail is created for every man, and an heavy yoke is upon the sons of Adam, from the day that they go out of their mother's womb till the day that they return to the mother of all things. Their imagination of things to come, and the day of death, trouble their thoughts and cause fear of heart; from him that sitteth on the throne of glory, unto him that is humbled in earth and ashes; from him that weareth the purple and a crown, unto him that is clothed with a linen frock."

WHE

HETHER there be more of joy or sorrow in human life is a question on which very different opinions are entertained. In answering it, many circumstances must be taken into account, and none more than the quantity of human misery which we admit within our observation. There was once an Eastern king who, desirous that his eye might never fall upon the wretchedness of his subjects, barred the entrance of his palace even to the light of the sun, and beneath the glitter of variegated lamps spent his days in jollity and mirth. And so might any one spend his days, could he be content to live by lamp-light, and contrive to exclude from his mind all that afflicts himself and others. That is what I cannot do. I survey the foes which, in countless hosts within us and without, wage war with human happiness. I reflect on the heaps of disappointed hopes that lie behind, and on the no less numerous fears of future evil which brood before, every member of our race. I learn from experience that there is scarce a family, scarce even a single individual, who is not burdened with some peculiar care, or wounded by some secret sorrow, according to the words of the poet

"In this vain world the days are not all fair

To suffer is the work we have to do;

And every one has got a cross to bear,

And every one some secret heart-ache too."

I think upon the sufferings which men inflict upon each other, and upon all the heavy strokes which they receive from the hand of God; and when I then direct my view to what they usually consider the compensation-I mean their so-called pleasures and enjoyments-it always appears to me as if the thousands who exult over the rich delights of life were wilfully cherishing a delusion which, in a sober mood, and had they but leisure to be alone, would vanish, and give place to the confession that they were not happy. And when I further reflect on the kind of consolation with which they try to sweeten the bitterness of life and death-those paltry schoolboy rhymes, by

which they fain would sing to rest their hearts that will not

and many of the same sort-O children! I exclaim, was ever a conflagration stamped out with the foot, or a falling avalanche arrested by the hand?

Of a truth, no clear-sighted man can doubt for a moment that this earth, on which hours of tame pleasure must needs be drowned in weeks of bitter anguish, is no longer a paradise. Deny it if you can, ye who involuntarily pay homage to the truth and are constrained to sing

Where grows the rose that has no thorn?

My child, I cannot tell;

No rose e'er blossomed here on earth,
That had not thorns as well.

Nay, have not even the sages of the Gentile world sung to us "That every good vouchsafed to mortals is accompanied by two sorrows"? and as for the attempt to calm the troubled heart by alleging that without the thorns the roses would give us no pleasure, I never could persuade myself that that was true. For how comes it, then, that we dream of a hereafter where the roses have no thorns, and where the garlands never wither? If the light could not gladden the heart of man without its attendant shadow, the shadow of this earth would necessarily stretch across into the land of the blessed.

No others may pass over the tears and shadows of this earthly life unconcerned-I cannot. Without belying my inmost convictions, I must assent to the words of the son of Sirach, that "Great travail is created for every man, and an heavy yoke is upon the sons of Adam, from the day that they go out of their mother's womb till the day that they return to

the mother of all things." I must admit that the same heavy yoke weighs upon him "that weareth the purple and a crown," as upon him "that is clothed with a linen frock." For though earthly misery, like sin, takes various shapes, not without reason did the ancients give wings to Care, for it is present in every place.

ance.

And I know of no key to the deep wretchedness of Adam's race save that which the Scriptures supply, when they tell us that the thistles and thorns first entered the earth with sin, and shall never be wholly extirpated save in that new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.1 No doubt this is a truth which it is very hard to confess. Admit it; and then every thorn upon the flowers of earth has a spiritual and unseen sting which wounds more sharply than that which pierces from without. And then, too, every thorn becomes to us a preacher of repentOh, how deep a humiliation this is, and how revolting to the flesh! Are the cares which infest the earth already so many and bitter; and yet must I feel in every one of them the additional sting of sin? It is even so; but in the very fact that so it is, behold, O man, the badge of thy nobility! Here is a proof that misery and pain, the crown of thorns and the bitter cross, appertain no more to thee than they did to thy Saviour. Our suffering is our bondage; and when "the glorious liberty of the children of God shall come," 2 they shall also be relieved from the thorny crown and the bitter cross. We shall then have grown to full age: for the present we are minors, and need the rod.

"It is a good thing," says the prophet, "for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth."3 The days of our life on earth are to us all a time of youth. And though "no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby." Yes: afterwards that peaceable fruit of righteousness shall we likewise reap.

1

2 Peter, iii. 13; Rev. xxi. 1.

3 Lam. iii. 27.

2 Rom. viii. 21.

4 Heb. xii. II.