concealed by the expediencies learned of intellectual prudence. When the second childhood is true and genial, the work of regeneration approaches its consummation, and the light of heaven is reflected from silver hairs, as if one stood nearer to Paradise, and caught reflections of the resurrection glories.

But, alas! is this all that is left of us amid the memorials of natural decay? Senses, memory, reason, all blotted out in succession, and instinctive affection left alone to its spontaneous workings, like a solitary flower breathing its fragrance upon snows? And how do we know but this, too, will close up its leaves and fall before the touch of the invader? Then the last remnant of the man is no more. Or, if otherwise, must so many souls. enter upon their immortality denuded of everything but the heart's inmost and ruling love?

How specious and deceptive are natural appearances! What seemed to the outward eye the waning of existence, and the loss of faculties, is only locking them up successively, in order to keep them more secure. Old age, rather than death, answers strictly to the analogies of sleep. It is the gradual folding in and closing up of all the voluntary powers after they have become worn and tired, that they may wake again refreshed and renovated for the higher work that awaits them. The psychological evidence is pretty full and decisive, that old age is sleep, but not decay. The reason lives, though its eye is temporarily closed; and some future day it will give a more perfect and pliant form to the affections. Memory remains,

though its functions are suspended for awhile. All its chambers may be exhumed hereafter, and their frescoes, like those of the buried temples Meroë, will be found preserved in unfading colors. The whole record of our life is laid up within us; and only the overlayings of the physical inan prevent the record from being always visible. The years leave their debris successively upon the spiritual nature, till it seems buried and lost beneath the layers. On the old man's memory every period seems to have obliterated a former one; but the life which he has lived can no more be lost to him or destroyed, than the rockstrata can be destroyed by being buried under layers of sand. In those hours when the bondage of the senses is less firm, and the life within has freer motion; or, in those hours of self-revelation, which are sometimes experienced under a clearer and more pervading light from above, the past withdraws its veil, and we see rank beyond rank, as along the rows of an expanding amphitheatre, the images of successive years, called out as by some wand of enchantment. There are abundant facts which go to prove that the decline and forgetfulness of years are nothing more than the hardening of the mere envelopment of the man, shutting in the inmost life, which merely waits the hour to break away from its bondage.

De Quincey says: "I am assured that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind. A thousand circumstances may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions of the mind; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription

remains forever; just as the stars seem to withdraw from the common light of the day; whereas, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them, as a veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed, when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn."

The resurrection is the inverse of natural decay; and the former is preparing ere the latter has ended. The affections being the inmost life, are the nucleus of the whole man. They are the creative and organific center, whence are formed the reason and the memory, and thence their embodiment in the more outward form of members and organs. The whole interior mechanism is complete in the chrysalis, ere the wings, spotted with light, are fluttering in the zephyrs of morning. St. Paul, who, in this connection, is speaking specially of the resurrection of the just, presents three distinct points of contrast between the natural body and the spiritual. One is weak, the other is strong. One is corruptible, the other is incorruptible. One is without honor, the other is glorious. By saying that one is natural and the other spiritual, he certainly implies that one is better adapted than the other to do the functions of the spirit, and more perfectly to organize and manifest its powers. How clearly conceivable then is it that when man becomes free of the coverings of mere natural decay, he comes into complete possession of all that he is, and all that he has ever lived; that leaf after leaf in our whole book of life is opened backward, and all its words and letters come out in more vivid colors! In the other life, therefore, appears the wonderful para

dox, that the oldest people are the youngest. To grow in age, is to come into everlasting youth. To become old in years, is to put on the freshness of perpetual prime. We drop from us the debris of the past, we breathe the ether of immortality, and our cheeks mantle with eternal bloom.

BEAUTIFUL EXTRACT.

When the summer of our youth is slowly wasting into the night-fall of age, and the shadow of the past grows deeper, as if life were near its close, it is pleasant to look back through the vista of time upon the sorrows and felicities of the years. If we have a home to shelter us, and friends. have been gathered by our firesides, then the rough places of wayfaring will have been worn and smoothed away in the twilight of life, while the sunny spots we have passed through will grow brighter and more beautiful. Happy, indeed, are those whose intercourse with the world has not changed the tone of their holier feelings, or broken the musical chords of the heart, whose vibrations are so melodious, so touching to the evening of age.

"Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.

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'Length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honour." -Proverbs, 3: 13, 16.

EFFECTS OF RELIGION IN OLD AGE AND

ADVERSITY.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE.

W

HEN the pulse beats high, and we are flushed with youth, and health, and vigor; when all goes on prosperously, and success seems. almost to anticipate our wishes, then we feel not the want of the consolations of religion; but when fortune frowns, or friends forsake us-when sorrow, or sickness, or old age comes upon us-then it is that the superiority of the pleasures of religion is established over those of dissipation and vanity, which are ever apt to fly from us when we are most in want of their aid. There is scarcely a more melancholy sight to a considerate mind, than that of an old man who is a stranger to those only true sources of satisfaction. How affecting, and at the same time how disgusting is it, to see such a one awkwardly catching at the pleasures of his younger years, which are now beyond his reach; or feebly attempting to retain them, while they mock his endeavors or elude his grasp ! To such a one, gloomily indeed does the evening of life set in! All is sour and cheerless. He can neither look backward with complacency, nor forward with hope; while the aged Christian, relying on the assured mercy of his Redeemer, can calmly reflect that his dismission is at