or besotted years of some who still account themselves and are accounted young. Love, live for, work for, the undying truth and good,- that is the way to nourish an undying vigor of the heart; these are the waters of the Fountain of Eternal Youth.

"Give me a thought, that I may refresh myself." The words come back again, to give the benediction of the hour. There are thoughts of God, of Duty, of Immortality, of the wonder and the glory of the world as science has revealed it to our apprehension and imagination, that will calm and freshen every hour they visit with their beauty, grace, and power. They are the thoughts of God and Duty and Immortality, of the wonder and the glory of the world, which are less and less each day the possession of a few, or of a sect despised and feared. They are spreading far and wide. They are becoming vital and operative parts of the faith of Christianity in all its forms, and of religion under every name it wears. If life is meant for blessing, peace, and joy, then it would seem as if these thoughts must correspond to certain great realities; for the blessing, peace, and joy they give are quite unspeakable. There are no greener pastures, there are no stiller waters, no high, unutterable facts which these figures of speech but faintly body forth, more staying, strengthening, satisfying to the soul than these have been and are. And I am well persuaded that our deeper thought will only tend to give them a more adequate foundation, that they may lift a more complete and soaring beauty up from man to God.

There is a river the streams whereof make glad the City of God, the Holy Place of the Tabernacle of the Most High. So wrote the Psalmist almost thirty centuries ago. The words are different: the thought, for us, is much the same as that which a Psalmist of the modern world, one whom we knew and reverenced and loved, embodied in his sweetest song. Both words and thought came back to me one day this summer,—one of the most precious in the count of many happy days. It was the day I spent in Concord, preaching there in the old church which could ring out

such a history from its belfry tower if it could tell the half that it has seen and known. And in the afternoon I went to Sleepy Hollow, as they call it, where the dead are lying. Hawthorne and Thoreau, Alcott and Emerson, are lying there; and, hard by, Gerrish, my noble friend, our soldier Barrett, too, and Ripley Bartlett, ever quaint and kind, and little Laura Schaumberg, named on her low white monument by the pet name which love had given her when she was all alive. And so the love of greatness and the greatness of love both spoke there to my heart, both spoke of immortality; and I was sure that what they said was true. And at the quiet ending of the day I sat beside a friendly door where I could see the river which gave Emerson the form and symbol of his thought, just as he thought about it when he wrote; for all its meadowy banks were overflowing with the "inundation sweet" of the great August rains. And this is what he wrote,- a poem of that River of God which flows for every man who lives, yet ever best for those who have an eye to watch the motion of its never-ending

stream:

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,

Repeats the music of the rain;

But sweeter rivers pulsing flit

Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain.

"Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:

The stream I love unbounded goes

Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.

"I see the inundation sweet,

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I hear the spending of the stream,

Through years, through men, through nature fleet,

Through love and thought, through power and dream.

Musketaquit, a goblin strong,

Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;
They lose their grief who hear his song,

And where he winds is the day of day.

"So forth and brighter fares my stream,-
Who drink it shall not thirst again;
No darkness stains its equal gleam,
And ages drop in it like rain."

ENDURING HARDNESS.

FROM first to last, I doubt not, there have been many sermons written on the text which occurs in the second letter to Timothy, "Endure hardness as a good soldier." Especially in times that tried men's souls, when armies have been mustering and meeting in the shock of battle, not only the chaplain on the tented field or in the populous hospital, but almost equally the preacher who has remained behind with the men too old for service, the women and the children, must have found this venerable injunction dilating with a new significance, and fairly thrusting itself upon him as the only one entirely suitable to the exigencies of the hour. The text is one which, for its best interpretation, needs the flash of musketry, the blaze of burning villages, the light that shines in eyes that seek in vain for faces they will never see again. We should expect some soldier or some soldier's wife to write the best sermon ever written on this text. And, if we could collect and then collate all of the sermons ever preached upon it, I doubt not that the fact would be precisely what we should expect. Certainly, the best sermon I have ever seen upon it was written by a soldier's wife, Mrs. Juliana Horatia Ewing. It is called "The Story of a Short Life." It isn't nominally a sermon, and, come to think of it, the text Endure hardness as a good soldier" is not placed! at its beginning and is nowhere quoted, if I recollect aright. No matter! The story is a sermon, and it is upon this text. This text is everywhere in and between the lines, as those of you who know it and love it as I do will bear me witness.

I am sure that many of you, and I trust the most of you, have read "The Story of a Short Life." Those of you who have done so will not, I trust, be sorry to recall its various charm for a few moments, while I indicate its character to

the end that I may show what a pathetic and impressive sermon it is upon its silent text, "Endure hardness as a good soldier."

The short life was that of a little English boy whose stately home was very near the soldiers' camp at Aldershot, in which he took so great an interest that he was always wanting to go there and see what was going on. The barrackmaster was his uncle; and this fact, together with his father's local dignity, made him a lad of privilege with officers and men. He was not by any means a faultless child, but selfwilled and obstinate; obstreperous, too, when crossed in any inclination. So, when there was to be some great parade of all the regiments in camp and others from elsewhere, he would take his dog with him in the carriage, and he would stand up on the seat to salute the soldiers, and he would hold the dog in his arms; and the dog didn't like the situation, nor did the horses; and they pranced, and Leonard fell, and from that day until his death he was a miserable little cripple, seldom without pain. But he wasn't made a perfect little saint at once by his misfortune. He was made more irritable than ever, and more impatient and exacting. Meantime, his interest in the soldiers had not abated in the least. Here was the mother's opportunity. She had wanted him to be a soldier, and was proud of his insistence that he would be Now this could never be; but was she willing that her son should be a coward because it was not the trumpet's sound that summoned him to fortitude? If she could not gird on his sword, might she not help him to carry his cross with martial courage? So she appealed to him to endure his hardness like a good soldier, with heroic patience, without complaint or murmuring. And the boy responded to her call. Henceforth, his aim was to translate his life, its pain and weariness and deprivation, into the terms of soldierdiscipline and the vicissitudes of a soldier's life. His days in bed should be his days in hospital; his aching back should be a soldier's wound; when it was worst, a soldier's night upon the field of battle, wounded and faint, with sleepless

one.

eyes impatient for the break of day. And, though it didn't seem to him that anything that he could ever do or bear would merit a Victoria Cross, he did his best to keep from anger and complaint, until one day his soul went up to heaven from a narrow bed in the real barracks, cheered by a soldier's song that he had always loved to hear, but which this time he heard not to the end.

And now, perhaps, all of you are saying that the experience of this martial child was so peculiar and unique that really it does not afford a basis of experience for men and women generally, who are called upon to suffer and endure. It isn't every suffering child that has an Aldershot at hand to furnish his imagination with materials into which he can translate the pains and deprivations that are incidental to his marred and wasting life. It isn't every suffering child that has the stuff in him that vibrates to the music of the spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, and all the various pride and pomp and circumstance of glorious war. Moreover, there was something childish in the boy's translation of his experience into the terms of camp and battle, wounds and hospital, which would be quite impossible for grown men and women, little given to sentiment or imagination, but with no immunity from the trials, calamities, and tragedies that enter so considerably into the majority of human lives. I have no desire to break, or even palliate, the force of these objections. Nevertheless, "The Story of a Short Life" is one which has significance for all men and women and for all boys and girls who have been "made subject to weakness," to deprivation, to dull or agonizing pain. Such cannot read it without sudden access of encouragement and strength. It is a story which all maimed and suffering folk might learn by heart with great advantage. It is a story which the most robust and fortunate of men, if they have any sensibility, cannot read without rebuke and inward shaming on account of their own fretfulness and impatience, simply because they have not everything they want.

Meantime, the only hardness in this world is not that of