philosophy, the king and the beggar, gold and rubbish, are equal in essentials. The earth is the Lord's.

"Go to the right hand, and go to the left-plod on along the arid, dreary path of life, or lie tossing on the bed of pain or of bereavement-look around for comfort or for hope, or for explanations-nowhere shall you find them but in the higher view. As oft the balloon sways agitated, uneasy, by the angry currents of the lower air till, rising high, it sails majestic and at peace in the tranquil, far-sighted reaches of the blue upper air, so the Psyche, on wings of truest faith, rises above the valley of death and the wail of despair to a higher, purer plain, where her survey, taking in great regions of truth and beauty unseen below, comprehends the mystery of life, and solves the problems of history.

"What a charming view is here of life! Fellow-strugglers, toiling on the road, be always serene; never fear. Be pure in heart, be one with God, and the Great Harmony will appear to you through the veil of phenomena. The Great Spirit (that lovely vision of Indian, as of Christian intuition) will move in nature, in your mind, and your body, and all your marvellous articulations and members will be respected and reverenced as Socratic evidence of the Infinite Beauty; your hands, instead of instruments of torture, will be divinest chaplets; your feet, instead of being swift to evil, will measure your prayers by your daily walks, and your humanity, a temple once again, will be the fairest shrine of the unutterable. The unity of the universe is perfection. Thus inspired, new aspects are the birth of every hour. All things are become new. They of this new Adamitic race, see God in everything-in the leaf, in the flower, in the bird, in the river, the elements, the tissues, the faculties of our unravelled world within, in the illuminated missals in the sky, and in the picture writing of earth. All is the Lord's; He is in all. This view of the world, made palpable, will open new scenes of beauty and delight, and man, thus himself again in God, will have pleasures for evermore."

As the solemn flow of words ceased on the lips of the great Athanasius, the faint streaks of dawn appeared above the Aventine, and the shades departing left the Forum to its awful solitude and silence.

CHAPTER LX.

THE SEPULCHRE.

Poor Monica had a terrible struggle at Rome. She lost her mo- / ther, Hyppolita, who sank early to rest, worn out by the sufferings of the time of persecution. She lost her husband, who, delicate in health, was broken in contact with the hard fight of life in the collision of a great money-grasping city. Reduced to

great poverty amidst the golden palaces of the Caesars, she was comforted in her distress by the thought that a holier One had not where to lay His head; and when the hardships of life pressed still harder upon her, and her night watches, divided between prayer and making artificial flowers, could no longer save her aged father, Milo, and her frail babe, Isidore, from drooping before her eyes in want, she sought the help of some sympathetic hearts among the influential Christians of Rome, and meeting with more response than would have attended her efforts in a later age, she was helped on her way to Palestine by the pious aid of Fabiola, Athanasia, and other charitable ladies.

After a stormy voyage, she reached Palestine, the aged Milo only wishing to live to lay his bones near the sacred places, and the young Isidore, drooping his feeble little head still more feebly on the loving mother's breast.

Toiling foot-sore over the barren hills and plains of Palestine, she reaches the neighbourhood of Bethlehem, and visiting worshipfully the sacred grotto, they pause to bathe their weary limbs in the waters of Jordan:

Doubt, fear, darkness, hangs over the future to Monica and her father in the wilderness of Jordan. Spectral forms swarm around them. Their life itself, which dates but from yesterday, is a bubble in the ocean of infinity-an endless mystery behind, and what before?

"Oh! what?" exclaims the thinking, anxious, storm-tossed Monica. "What?" sighs forth the mourning heart, stricken low by sorrow's blow-the aged Milo, with trembling step, tottering to the grave-the tender mother, as her infant gasps.

away its young life upon her loving bosom. "Is life a mockery?

for doubts come thick; the dance of death with an army of skeletons grinning on our useless strife. Is it a hell, as some have thought? What lies beneath this crust of earth? The dust of former races. Is that all? Are there shades of the de

parted great below? Is the tempest's howl, ocean's thunder, the rustling forest, full of spirit voices, or are they hushed for ever? Mortal man, these are vital questions. Who shall tell us whence we are, and what comes next? Knock at the tomb. No note, no tone of better worlds re-echoes through its damp sepulchral vault! Question the lamps of heaven. They burn on, bright and pure, and sing together in joyful chorus, while wars, and famine, and pestilence choke this charnel-house beneath. Comfortless, despairing, shrouded in gloom, the thoughtful sufferers turn on all sides, but see no ray of comfort; and, while sin, and pain, and death, and madness, and appalling catastrophes shake this earth, strip it of the lovely and the good, and spread it with ruins and gore, the silent tears course down the cheek of Monica, and she repeats, "What next, what next?" Overcome by slumber, a vision visits her distress.

Night hangs over the sacred city; silence reigns within the walls of Zion. The moon silvers the mournful olives as they tremble in the night air, on the memorable mount. Nature slumbers, man slumbers, and the heavens look down serene on the scene of that day's blood and sacrilege.

Three crosses cast their shadows o'er the place of skulls, like giant phantom forms. Two human bodies hang quivering, suspended in mid air. The third is gone. "And is that body human, too?" she asks. An answer came; two thousand years dispute about that answer; its nature is still a problem to broad lands and nations, and yet the echo of the truth has flown from pole to pole, and the Great Sacrifice and God's Blood are stamped upon remotest creed and alien worship. For on that day, amidst earthquake, and darkness, and the risen dead, a God had parted from a flesh, however glorious, yet too small to house Him. Incarnate Love tore itself from the mother and the son, and left them and earth to mourning and to tears. He went below; and what He did there no tongue, or pen of Dante, or of Patmos, hath ever told, or would tell. "And did He leave us, then, for ever?" she questions. "Not so,” reply angelic voices; "for how could we, and man, and earth continue to this hour? and what but His Spirit and His Presence have kept the world from the crack of doom?" "A little while and ye shall see Me." O word to soothe the saddest hour-to smoothe the lines of age, the pillow of despair. For where, amidst this wilderness of woe, shall the battered vagrant of humanity find refuge and repose save under the shadow of the Rood, before the silence of the Everlasting Presence.

Meanwhile, man as usual first wonders, then regrets, and cries himself, child-like, at last to sleep. And Jerusalem slumbers over the corpse of her divine hero-prophet. And now his countrymen and humanity, whom he embraced in his omniarchal love, slumber on, while angels hover round that mysterious form, and keep watch over the precious relics of a perfect man. Scattered around the tomb in that celebrated garden, lie the mail-clad legionary warriors of Rome. Those veterans who, led by the staff of a Pompey or Cæsar, had trampled on the neck of nations and of kings, and borne the badge and banners of the "Senate and the People" over the known and even the unknown world. Familiar with death, used to the blast of trumpets, the thunder of charging hosts, these masters of the world sleep too. They fear not man, and Rome's divinity shall, according to Sybilline oracles, outlast the nations. The world sleeps. Type of the moral slumber of that age of night!

A dreamy world was that of ancient times. Some of these dreams were beautiful and bright in the early spring of man, like a chaste and joyous summer's dawn. Earth, air, and sea danced around the infant human race, and as to the childish negro brain, each novelty is fetish, so to the first race of man, the flitting mist, echo's mystery, the thunderbolt, Aurora's streamers, or the tempest's gamut had a language each, and became the Peris, Divs, or angels of other encircling realms. Naiads, nymphs, and syrens peopled the groves and glades and the cerulean cavities of the deep, shadowy worlds encompassed this hard reality, and while a peaceful golden age cast its lustre through the twilight of the past, the sunny savannahs and verdant slopes of Elysium invited the weary wanderer of earth to rest in a ravishing perspective. Yet these were dreams, beautiful, I grant, light, graceful and gay, yet only dreams, or dissolving views faintly shadowing the glories and the tints of Eden. Then, too, at times the slumber was profound. Oracular voices strove at intervals to rouse the drowsy race-too oft in vain. Repletion and indulgence oppressing the brain and the intellect drew a curtain before the realities of spiritual things. Apathy and indifference held as now the reigns of thought, and monsters and abortions were the products of men's brains. In the language of Euripides, many said: "Who knows if life be not that which we call death, and death the thing that we call life?" or worse, how few there were who cared what it was, so long as self and sin prevailed. The world, moreover, was dead; its lies buried in the tomb, and how shall it live? The

winding sheet of sin hangs over the earth, men's minds are coffined in matter, the earth is a place of shadows and of skulls. Well may the world be dead; it has lost its God, it has lost Paradise, it has lost Heaven, it doubts truth, wisdom is a quibble, virtue a bubble, Rome has gained the world, but the Romans have lost their own souls. What availed the Cæsar's trophies, the pomp of consular and imperial magnificence, the pride of lictors, the sophistry of academics, and the rhetoric of the rostrum or the bema? The world was dead, and neither the thunder of Cicero's eloquence nor the blast of Cæsar's trumpets could revive a rotten race. Bacchanalian orgies and unnatural crimes soiled the image of the Holy One. Let them crown their brows with garlands and deck their limbs in robes of purple and gold; within they are full of corruption and dead men's bones. Faith is extinct, purity impossible, charity unknown, humanity undiscovered. Diogenes still seeks a man; philosophy has wrought much on paper and dreamt bravely of great things, but the supernatural fire has deserted the Promethean convicts, and the angel, stripped of reverence, has lost his wings and drooping fallen to brutish ways. Woe to that age which lacks the shield, the grace, the glory of religion! Man soon becomes a beast when that has left his breast. I fear this age has that tendency. We worship gold not God, we are politic not religious, we prefer the fashion of our apparel to the sceptre and diadem of soul, the breadth of our lands to the breadth of our hearts. Can this be so, or is it all a distressing dream? With the superb heavens and glorious earth spread around us and the mysteries and marvels of worlds and spheres and kingdoms flashing upon us from galaxies and dewdrops, while the words of Jesus and the visions of Patmos take us up to heights too great for speech or thought; do we still grovel, swine-like, in the mud and shut our eyes to the light and voices in and all around us? Do we still cast away the vesture of divinity with which the Christ would

clothe us?

There have been several periods of moral prostration and death; lulls in the history of man when all the divine and heavenly within, slumbers a deep sleep akin to death. As in the natural world, geology has disclosed successive stages, ushered in and superseded by violent convulsions; in fact, a progressive development of worlds, each offering an advance upon its predecessor, so man has advanced by successive steps and been des veloped by a series of moral revolutions and new creations. certain intervals old things have passed away and all things have

At