pleted. Forms of church government, human ordinances, and those intellectual labours which are employed in their establishment and defence, are adapted only to a state of imperfection, to the condition of individuals preparing for a higher existence; and, so far from being ultimate objects, are only instruments and agencies, to be discarded when their purposes are accomplished. "Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away." Everything that is purely subordinate and distinctive in religion—everything that is extraneous to the spiritual nature, however necessary to educate it-everything that bears the stamp of man's weakness, ignorance, or sinfulness, will vanish as the winter leaves of time from the expanding bud of everlasting life; and out of the wrecks of earth only a living faith in the atoning Saviour, the hope that maketh not ashamed, and the charity which is the bond of perfectness, will escape. "And now abideth faith,

hope, charity, these three."

It is through loss that all gain in this world is made. The winter leaves must fall that the summer leaves may grow. But in heaven a different law of development will prevail. In the trees of warm climates the buds have no winter leaves or protective scales, being simply formed of the ordinary leaves rolled up; consequently they expand in growth without losing anything. And

so it will be in the eternal summer above. There will be a constant unfolding of the fulness of immortal life from glory to glory; but there will be no loss of the processes and experiences through which the unfolding will take place. The means and the end will be one and the same. There will be a constant reaching forth unto those things which are before, but there will be no forgetting the things that are behind.

A GRAVE BESIDE A STREAM.

"For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away al' tears from their eyes."-REV. vii. 17.

How strange the union of the stream and grave!

Eternal motion and eternal rest;

Earth's billow fixed, beside the transient wave
Upon the water's breast.

The summer cloud upon the height distils

Each sunny ripple hurrying swiftly past;
And man's proud life, like fleeting vapour, fills
This wave of earth at last.

The streamlet, through the churchyard's solemn calm.
Sounds like an ancient prophet's voice of faith,
Chanting beside the grave a glorious psalm

Of life in midst of death.

The living water and the burial mound

Proclaim in parable, that through death's sleer
Flows on for aye, though none may hear its sound
Life's river still and deep.

The grave like Laban's "heap of witness" seems,
Raised 'twixt the sleeper and the world's alarm,
O'er which no anxious cares or evil dreams

May pass to do him harm.

No more he wrestles by the brook of life;
The night is past-the Angel stands revealed;
He now enjoys the blessing wrung from strife,
And every wound is healed.

CHAPTER XI.

LIGHT IN DARKNESS.

"And the light shineth in darkness.”—JOHN i. 5.

When

THE HE use of light is to illumine or reveal. Without light there can be no vision. The eye and the light are so wonderfully adapted to each other, that by their mutual co-operation we are enabled to see. complete darkness envelopes the earth, we see neither the shape nor the colour of any object. All within the horizon is reduced to one uniform blackness and emptiness. On the contrary, when the sun rises and pours his universal daylight over the world, a beauteous scene of varied forms and harmonious colours is created, as it were, out of the seeming void. Colour is the flower of light, and has no existence apart from light; and form and outline can only be distinguished when traced out for us by the same luminous pencil. And yet, paradoxical as it may seem, light conceals as well as reveals. Extremes meet here, and excess of light blinds as much as excess of darkness. At mid-day the unprotected eye cannot gaze upon the sun; when it attempts to do so for the shortest period, it sees nothing in the dazzling radi

ance, and on turning to other objects a filmy cloud for a while interposes and obscures the vision. When the sunlight is concentrated in its full effulgence upon an object, its hue and shape are lost in a uniform white glare; when the vivid summer noon broods over the landscape, its varied details are rendered vague and indistinct in a dim haze of light. Many objects are entirely hid from us by light. The stars are shining at noon as truly as at midnight, but the veil of light conceals them from our view. The phosphorescence of the sea is as fully displayed in the day as in the night, though we do not see it. The fires that are burning constantly upon the volcano-peaks-the Vesta-altars of the earth-have their splendour paled by the sunlight. It needs the tender twilight to bring out the exquisite brilliancy of the evening star; and the midnight gloom of winter to show the illimitable spaces beyond the sun, and to cover the sky with the glories of Orion and the Pleiades, of Arcturus and his sons. It needs the sable curtains of darkness to fall, ere the pillar of lurid cloud that ascends all day from Vesuvius becomes a pillar of fire, lighting up the firmament with its crimson glow. It needs the solar lamp to be extinguished and the theatre of nature darkened, to show to us the tropic sea in some measure as St. John saw the mystic sea before the throne-a sea of glass, as it were, mingled with fire.

Light cannot be seen in light. The more luminous overpowers or extinguishes the feebler. We cannot see the light of a candle if we hold it up against the sun; and the recently discovered lime or Drummond light, whose

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