through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me." It is but a moment's passage, through a sharp anguish, to a world where the sunlight is eternal.

I once came back to the daylight after long wandering in subterranean caves. While I live I can never forget the vision. Words cannot paint the splendour of colour which seemed to blaze on the bare rock under whose arch I issued forth, as the sunlight caught the mosses and lichens, or shot a shaft of glory into depths of shade. The sun was shining there as it had been shining for ages. It was no other sunlight than had life-long gladdened my sight. But it seemed to me as if at that moment the veil of Creation had been lifted; as if for the first time I had seen Light. Once again, I thought, I shall see that revelation. Light, to which even this blaze of splendour is but murky vapour, will one day burst upon my sight, when I emerge from the straits, the anguish of my night of travail, and in my flesh. in the eternal sunlight, I shall see God.

"THOU HAST BROUGHT ME OUT INTO A LARGE PLACE."

VIII.

THE PILGRIMS.

"For they that say such things, declare plainly that they seek a country."-Heb. xi. 14.

LITERALLY a fatherland.

The writer means that here we suffer, toil, and hope, in exile; the Father's home, the kingdom of our perfect and eternal citizenship, is beyond. Thus, too, St. Paul; "At home in the body, exiled from the Lord." And who that aims at the higher life is at rest and satisfied, in the inmost heart of him, with anything which he can see, or hope for, or dream of as possible, in such a world as this? It is a strange, sad life, which asks the heaviest sacrifices of its noblest children, and inflicts on them the keenest pain. There would be no key to it-no possible means of understanding such a history of sacrifice and suffering as this chapter records, and which every faithful soul through all the Christian ages repeats—if God Himself had not come down to live it, that He might make it visibly the vestibule of an eternal life; wherein all that is dark will be revealed, all that is wrong will be righted, and the sufferers for righteousness' sake will be justified and glorified for ever.

I confess that this is the very core of my theology; that is, of such notions of the nature, methods and purposes of God, as I have been able to work out from my experience of life, and my study of His word. It would all be dark to me, utterly, hopelessly dark, if I did not believe that the travail of life and of the Creation is, not watched and pitied only, but shared to its uttermost depths of pain, by the Lord.

There are those, no doubt, who find life very pleasant, and their course very prosperous, and very satisfying to all the desires and cravings which are as yet awakened within their being. But they have not yet begun to live. They are out of the concord of all the great ones of the world through all the ages; and if they rest there they must look downward and not upward for the true comrades of their spirits; they will find their true kindred in the end, not among the saints or the angels, but among the brutes.

But most of us, I imagine, if we were to utter the deepest judgment of our spirits, would say, I would not live alway, at least such a life and in such a world. If I must live for ever, my God! let it not be under this burden, with this fleshly clog, amid these wailings and moanings, this sadness, this conflict, this sin! Let me not drag on this double, discordant nature, the hand on the gate of heaven, the foot on the threshold of hell; every moment a care, a strain, a terror-for "if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and

the sinner appear?" and with which shall I stand? No, if I am to live, if this burden of existence under such stern conditions is one which I may not lay down, let me live under simpler, purer, more homelike conditions, in a world which shall meet instead of mocking the deepest needs and yearnings of my spirit, which shall help instead of marring the fair unfolding of my powers; in which my heart shall not be wrung by the sadness around me, nor torn by the strife within; and in which I may be able to believe with calm confidence that I am the child of a benign and blessed Creator, and that He made me and means me to be blest.

I suppose that these, or something like these, are the terms which we should be disposed to lay down, if we could make a treaty with heaven as to the conditions of our existence; or if the question were submitted to us, whether we would elect to live on or to be struck out of the book of the living for ever. We should be disposed to demand some such conditions as these for a life which is never to die. Well, the Gospel means and the Bible declares, that the God who made us has laid down these conditions for us. This is the life, yea, fairer than this, fairer than anything of which our finite faculties can at present dream, which He who laid this burden of existence upon us has ordained, and for which, with wise, firm, fatherly foresight, He is training us in His Son.

There would be no honest possibility of escape from the conclusion, either that a malign spirit

has made and rules this sad, suffering world, or that opposing spirits of equal power are struggling for the possession of the world and of the soul, if the Bible had not revealed this life distinctly as an education. Like all education, it is inevitably full of toil, and care, and pain; but these have their explanation, their only but ample explanation, in the life of which this is but the vestibule; where they are who have fought the battle and borne the strain before us, and whence their voices flow down, as peace streams down on the soft, calm evening air,

Mortal, they softly say,

Peace to thy heart.
We too, yes, mortal,

Have been as thou art.
Hope-lifted, doubt-depressed,
Seeing in part;

Tried, troubled, tempted,

Sustained as thou art.

Or in words of sublimer and more far-reaching strain, "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is an heavenly; wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he hath prepared for them a city. . .