He died; and yet thy days of gladness He is the life; anew thou livest; He keeps the love thy heart deploreth; IV. Many joyous days have found me, All my former world was shattered; To my heart a worm had gone ; While I thus, in silence pining, Whom I saw, my heaven revealing, If I him but have, Glad I fall asleep; For the flood his heart forth gave Strength within my heart shall keep; And with soft compelling, All shall soften like a spring upwelling. If I him but have, Mine the world I call; Like a cherub, happy, grave, Holding back the virgin's veil; Rapt in deep beholding, Earth forsakes me like a scroll upfolding. Where I have but him, VI. Were none by thee remaining, I often weep at thinking Thou hast lain down and died; And thy redeemed, shrinking, Pass on the other side. For our sakes moved only, Thou hast wrought patiently; And yet thou liest lonely, And no one thinks of thee. By every man, unshaken Thou standest, wilt not rue; For if by all forsaken, Thou yet remainest true. And thus thy love did find me. In very being bind me One day, themselves bethinking, 372 A Christian Common-Place Book. FOR the poverty which was honoured by the great painters and thinkers of the middle ages was an ostentatious, almost a presumptuous poverty; if not this, at least it was chosen and accepted the poverty of men who had given their goods to feed the simpler poor, and who claimed in honour what they had lost in luxury; or, at the best, in claiming nothing for themselves, had still a proud understanding of their own self-denial and a confident hope of future reward. But it has been reserved for this age to perceive and tell the blessedness of another kind of poverty than this, not voluntary nor proud, but accepted and submissive; not clearsighted and triumphant, but subdued and patient; partly patient in tenderness-of God's will; partly patient in blindness-of man's oppression; too laborious to be thoughtful-too innocent to be conscious-too long experienced in sorrow to be hopeful-waiting in its peaceful darkness for the unconceived dawn, yet not without its own sweet, complete, untainted happiness, like intermittent notes of birds before the daybreak, or the first gleams of heaven's amber on the eastern grey. poverty as this it has been reserved for this age of ours to honour while it afflicted; it is reserved for the age to come to honour it-and to spare.-Ruskin's Notes on the Royal Academy, No. IV. 1858. Such If a blind man were desirous of beholding a landscape, and had the hope at the same time of having his sight miraculously restored to him, he might, even when blind, go to the right post of observation, and turn his face to the right direction, and thus wait for the recovery of that power which was extinguished. And, in like manner, we are all at the right post, when we are giving heed to our Bibles. We are all going through a right exercise when with the strenuous application of our natural powers we are reading and pondering, and comparing and remembering the words of the testimony; and if asked how long we should persevere in this employment, let us persevere in it with patience and prayer until, as Peter says, the day dawn, and the daystar arise in our hearts.-Chalmers' Lectures on the Romans. Even at this day there are many for whom it is expedient that Jesus should go away from them, and for the selfsame reason for which it was expedient that he should go away from his disciples. Perhaps I might say that even at this day there is no one for whom this is not expedient, or at least for whom it has not been so at some period of his life. For we are all of us, even those who have been brought up with the greatest wisdom, and the most diligent culture of their religious affections, far too apt to look at Jesus Christ in the first instance in the same light in which the disciples mostly looked upon him while he was with them in the body, as a man like ourselves, a perfect man, indeed, but still a mere man, who came to teach us about God, and the things of heaven, and the way of attaining to them, and to leave us an example, that we might follow his steps. We read the story of his life in the gospels; and even our natural hearts are struck and charmed by the surpassing beauty of his character, by his purity, his meekness, his patience, his wisdom, his unweariable, self-forgetting activity in every work of love. In our better and more serious moments, when the Bible is in our hands, or when we have been stirred by some eloquent picture of the graces manifested in his life, we wish to be like him, to do as he did, to obey his commandments, at least a part of them, the part which requires the least selfsacrifice and self-denial. All the time, indeed, we may be in the habit of acknowledging with our lips that Christ is God, not merely in the public profession of the creed, but whenever our conversation turns upon religion, and whenever we bring the question distinctly before our minds. Yet we scarcely think of him as God. We little think what that acknowledgment means or implies. Our thoughts are solely fixed on the excellence of his human character; and inasmuch as we admire him, losophy has solaced her journey through the wilderness of logical speculation,you are wont to think of the virtues exhibited in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as of the same kind, only superior in degree, purer and more perfect. Now this fair ideal of excellent humanity may indeed be a blessing to you for a time, a light to your understandings, and a joy to your hearts,-as the contemplation of all virtue, of whatsoever is lovely and noble, will ever be to a genial and generous spirit. Were you living in a happy island, in an Elysium, where sin was not, and did not cast her shadow, death, were there no evil spirit lurking in your own hearts, and ever and anon rising and shaking himself, and shattering the brittle crust with which amiable feelings and conventional morality may have covered them over, and were there no herd of evil spirits howling and prowling on every side around you, tearing the vitals of society, mangling every soul they can seize, while others more craftily put on the mask of pleasure and gain and honour, and use every art in fawning on our self-love,-in a word, had you no immortal souls slumbering beneath the painted sepulchre of mortality, were you not made in the image of God, and fallen from that image, were you the mere insects of time, then, indeed, it might be sufficient for you to bask in the light of an earthly sun. But the light of that sun will pass away from you: the vapours of sin will hide it from your sight: the glaring lights of the world will draw you afar from it: aud ere long you will find a night of thick, impenetrable darkness spread over you and around you, unless you have a living faith in the Sun of Righteousness, whom neither light nor darkness can conceal, and who shines all the brighter upon the soul when everything else seems cheerless and hopeless.-Hare's Mission of the Com and wish to be like him, we fancy we may take rank among his true disciples. Nay, we even begin to fancy that we have something in common with him, that our admiration renders us like him. Thus we glorify human nature for Christ's sake; and we glorify ourselves as sharing the same nature with Christ. Meanwhile we think little of his death, except on account of the virtues which he manifested before his judges and on the cross. Now he who thinks of Christ in this manner, if he happens by nature to be of a kindly disposition, may at times really try to imitate him, even as he might try to imitate any other good or great man in history. At times, when brought more immediately and consciously into Christ's presence, by hearing or reading about him, such persons may be kindled to a longing, and even to an effort, to resemble him. There are many such persons in the world; there are many assuredly in this congregation. Among the young, especially in the educated classes, this, or something like it, is the ordinary state of feeling with regard to the Saviour. Yes, my young friends, I feel confident that there are many, very many amongst you, who think of our blessed Lord after this fashion, who admire and revere and love the peerless graces of his character, who would rejoice at times to enrich your own character with a portion of those graces, but who have no lively consciousness that Christ is your God, that he is your Saviour, that he died for your sins to bring you to God,-who do not feel that you need his help, who never seek to enter into a living communion with him, nay, who have no conception what can be meant by such a communion. Accustomed as you are to contemplate the noblest and fairest examples of humanity that history and poetry have set up for the admiration of mankind, accustomed to meditate on the brightest intuitions wherewith phi-forter. A HYMN OF TRUE HAPPINESS. Amidst the azure clear Of Jordan's sacred streams, dear, When zephyrs flowers unclose, arose. Upon her head she wore Her left hand palms, her right a bran- Unveil'd skin's whiteness lay, |