June 6. For this God is our God for ever and ever; He will be our guide even unto death.-Ps. xlviii. 14. "HIS bodily life which we think so sacred, and which THIS is such a mystery, as it waits on the beating pulse and runs through the throbbing, tingling veins, is unutterably less precious than the other life of God in the soul. The life of the body wastes like the dropping sand, and is daily swept away, as the dust of the floor, into the tomb, whose door swings in a thousand turnings while we speak. But the other life, that Christ gives, is not consumed. The language of Scripture lament was not taken up over that. It is no vapor, no fleeing shadow, or withering flower, but firm, bright, and blooming with immortal vigor and increase. CYRUS A. BARTOL. DEATH.1 I. THE dew is on the summer's greenest grass The sun shines sweetly, sweeter may These words have shaken mighty human souls; 1 This poem is among the last of Nicoll's compositions. Are there not aspirations in each heart Things more exalted - steeped in deeper bliss? ROBERT NICOLL. June 7. If a man keep My saying, he shall never taste of death.JOHN viii. 52. - FOR when he dies, life shall so lift itself up before him, that for this life which he sees, he shall not be able to see death. For the night becomes clear light, and bright as day, because the light and the shining of that rising, dawning, new life, altogether quenches and shines. away this dying and self-destroying death. LUTHER. DEATH. II. DEATH comes to take me where I long to be; To lands which know not one unhappy hour: a faith; from sorrow here I'm led by death away; why should I start and fear ? If I have loved the forest and the field, Can I not love them deeper, better, there? A change from woe to joy, from earth to heaven, May meet again! Death answers many a prayer. I would be laid among the wildest flowers, Death is upon me, yet I fear not now; That fills each alley, close, and copsewood nook; ROBERT NICOLL. June 8. That the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest. - DEUT. xiv. 29. B LESSED is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a lifepurpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an everdeepening river there, it runs and flows; draining off the sour, festering water gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green, fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream, how blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labor is life; from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence, breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge, "self-knowledge," and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge! the knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. 66 Properly, thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working; the rest is yet all an hypothesis of knowledge, a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic vortices, till we try it and fix it. Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone." All true work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labor, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven. THOMAS CARLYLE: Past and Present. I AM a stream of Time, running to God my sea, CHERUBIC PILGRIM. BROOK AND LIFE. I TRACED a little brook to its well-head, Where, amid quivering weeds, its waters leap From the earth, and hurrying into shadow, creep Unseen but vocal in their deep-worn bed. Hawthorns and hazels, interlacing, wed With roses sweet, and overhang the steep Mossed banks, while through the leaves stray sunbeams peep, Still fresh and fragrant, though in shadow hiding, RICHARD WILTON: Good Words. June 9. What! Could ye not watch with Me one hour? — MATT. xxvi. 40. THE love of the things that perish can only be driven out by the strength of a superior love. Love is the pure and perfect discipline. He who is perfect in love, the love of the divinely beautiful and good, is perfect in life. He who loves finds sacrifice holy, battle joyous, toil easy; pain has even a sweetness when love imposes it, and tender touches purge all the anguish away. Commence your self-discipline by that which alone can complete it. Open your heart to the love of the Lord Jesus. Loving Him, all lovely things fall into their just proportion, their true relation to your being; while all unlovely things fall into their true contempt and shame. It is the one regnant principle in the free creation. It will make such order in your nature as reigns in the bright universe around you. It shines resplendent as the essential glory in the saints and angels who bow before the eternal throne. J. BALDWIN BROWN. TWO THAT SLEEP AND ONE THAT WATCHETH. [Suggested by the picture by S. Solomon.] "COULD ye not watch one hour?" The hour is late, The stars are clear, but not to them his eyes That sweat of blood; to hear that cry of woe! F. W. BOURDILLON. |