doubt and unrest in his silent and eternal patience. What is lost will be recovered, what is missed will yet be found; for all is stored in him; and is but reserved as his everlasting answer to human fidelity and trust.

"His eye seeth every precious thing." But there are a great many things, in this world at least, that are not "precious" at all: indifference and ease, which are burdens upon the life of the world; vanity, selfishness, and malice, which are its poison and pestilence. These things also are not unseen by him: lurk they under ever so fair a disguise, the cloak of wisdom, the decencies of wealth, or the gloss of an untarnished name, he looks at them with divine sorrow and displeasure, and leaves them till they turn and look at him. It is the shadow of his glance that falls on them; for evil ever hides itself and skulks before his holy face; and a man whose life and thought are only for himself feels hurt and flurried at the name of God, and helpless as in a strange land without interpreter. But it is with a soft light and a tender meaning that "His eye seeth every precious thing"; drawn thither by likeness and the affinity of love, and resting there with pure content. His perception singles out the jewels of the universe, like the telescope that passes rapidly over darkness and negation and pitches searchingly on stars. It is but an empty metaphysic dream to suppose his gaze and presence so equal and

universal, that he makes no difference between here and there, and is above (we should rather say below) acknowledging a favourite abode.

Where then are we to look for the retreat he chiefly seeks? It is not, for that were a Heathen dream,— with the rich aspiring Intellect; it is not,-for this were a Stoic pride, with the labouring Will, that he dwells and brings the witness of his peace; but with those who can leave off claiming anything at all, and, standing free of the ligaments of self, can yield to him possession of what they are and what they have, and say, 66 Lord, use us as thou wilt, and turn us this way and that; only stay with us till eventide, and then may we put our hand in thine, as the hand of a little child that is led out in the dark." The soul that can thus throw open the door of her tent, and hang the curtain back for the breath of heaven that bloweth where it listeth, is soon aware that a Holy Guest has entered in, and asks the tender welcome he has a right to command, and puts a coolness on every heated passion, and fills all the place with an air of meditation and divine communion.

Thus at least we must speak of him and to him, in his relations to our own spiritual life; and of his "Absolute " essence, I suppose, we cannot speak at all. God in himself, as he was before ever a soul existed in his likeness, and while yet every precious thing was shut up within his unexpressed infinitude,

may be the sort of impassive sublimity that some imagine; a palace of mere intellectual space, where you vainly seek a surface on which any colour can be flung; without love, without preference, without sorrow, a shadowless light equivalent to universal darkness. But God in the midst of a mixed universe, Lord of the eternal contest between good and ill, has an eye for "every precious thing," mingles with every noble strife; burns in the blush of holy shame, aspires in our heavenward aspirations, and weeps in our repentant tears. In the saddest haunts of sin, the rotting life of great cities, he sees the scanty blossoms that yet assert their native beauty here and there; the fresh possibilities of good that come again with every new and unspoiled life; the precious simplicity of the child, spreading an open field and the cleanest furrows for the good seed that faithful hands may scatter; the preternatural haste of the first great sin and its slowlysmothered compunctions in the retrospect; the manly resolve, the womanly endurance, the human generosity, the divine faith, gleaming through the smoke, but caught up and cherished by no earthly sympathy, and pressed upon by fierce temptation till overwhelmed and lost. Let the strife of conscience be feeble as it may, and on a spot however unlovely, he mingles with the scene and is there to cheer the good fight: the very prison bars cannot avail against his holy Spirit; and the noisome places of humanity, that stop the advances

of our fastidiousness, are not without the visits of his

infinite purity.

Whoever is tempted to dismiss these things as dreams of too transcendent faith may be assured that, in forgetting them, he loses the inmost soul of human charity. Love and patience sustain themselves, not on the infirmities and grievances which they see, but on a perfection behind which is as yet invisible. In the pride and glory of life that dazzle so many thoughtless hearts, it is wholesome to remember how different are the actual proportions of things as discerned by him that is ever in the midst; how many of the first are really last, and of the last are first. Deep in the recesses of private life, shrinking from public ways, he sees many a noble purpose intensely working its silent way; or a hidden sorrow consuming its own smoke, and turning it to flame; or a sweet and self-denying patience, bearing the thorny cross under the gay attire, and covering the plaintive hymn beneath the notes of joy. Life is deeper than it seems; and it may well check our petty cavils and censorious judgments to remember, that he who sees and loves according to the truth of things may have his place and dear abode in the inner mind of the very neighbour we criticize and the heretic we shun; may think nothing at all of the small matters we derisively apprehend, and gently love the greater ones we blindly overlook; and find not only many a precious thing concealed from us, but gracious

affection and pure thought that do not even see themselves. Nay; have you never known among your own friends, one whom you would completely misjudge, if you looked no farther than the outward ways and words through which he intentionally speaks; who lightly plays with the surface of experience, and elastically throws off its severer incidents; who is reticent of his own troubles and calm towards those of others, as if both were matters of course, to be quickly dismissed into the past and cleared out of the way; but who, within this smooth and hard activity, hides quite another nature unsuspected by the common eye; a pathetic thought betrayed only in the flash of humour that tries to suppress it; a fire of enthusiasm which never reports itself as heat, but simply in the steadfast tension of a noble life;-a religious depth, unrevealed unless in the books he loves, and in the simple dignity of his presence ? Were you blind to these things, how different and how mistaken would your affection for him be! What folly then there is in our cynic mood, which either heeds not these inner secrets of the soul, or replaces them by mean conjectures of our own! There is no human life so poor and small as not to hold many a divine possibility, its "angel that always beholds the face of the Father who is in Heaven." And this is enough to make tenderness and reverence nearer to truth than any suggestion of suspicion or impulse of contempt.