evidently with the deepest interest. This, at last, is the judgment which the Pope pronounces on him :

For the main criminal I have no hope
Except in such a suddenness of fate.
I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky, or sea, or world at all;

But the night's black was burst through by a blaze,
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost dis-shrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.

Degraded and debased, Guido is seen to be not past hope by the true spiritual eye. And what is the issue? Up to the last, with fresh kindled passion, the great criminal re-asserts his hate. He gathers strength to repeat his crime in will. I grow, he says, one gorge

To loathingly reject Pompilia's pale

Poison my hasty hunger took for food.

So the end comes.

The ministers of death claim him. In his agony he summons every helper whom he has known or heard of—

Abate, Cardinal, Christ, Maria, God—

and then the light breaks through the blackest gloom :

Pompilia, will you let them murder me?

In this supreme moment he has known what love is, and, knowing it, has begun to feel it.

The cry, like the intercession of the rich man in Hades for his five brethren, is a promise of a far-off deliverance.

In this case the poet shews how we may take heart again in looking at the tragedies of guilt.

But there are wider and more general sorrows in life. There is the failure, the falling from our ideal, of which we are all conscious; there is the incompleteness of opportunity, which leaves noblest powers unused. Browning states the facts without reserve or palliation : All labour, yet no less

Bear up beneath their unsuccess.

Look at the end of work, contrast

The petty Done with the Undone vast,

This Present of theirs with the hopeful Past!

In dealing with the difficulties which are thus raised, Browning offers what appears to me to be his most striking message. Acknowledged failure is, he teaches, a promise of future attainment; unfruitful preparation is the sign of the continuity of life. And these two principles rest on another: imperfection is the condition of growth:

What's whole can increase no more,

Is dwarfed and dies, since here's its sphere.

And hence comes (as may be noticed parenthetically) the contrast between works of art and living men:

They are perfect-how else? they shall never change:
We are faulty-why not? we have time in store.

The artificer's hand is not arrested

With us we are rough-hewn, nowise polished:

They stand for our copy, and once invested

With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished.

'Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven;

The better! what's come to perfection perishes.

Failure, as Browning treats it, may come in two ways. It may come from what he does not scruple to call "the corruption of man's heart," or it may come from the want of necessary external help.

The first form of failure is in various degrees universal.

But as long as effort is directed to the highest, that aim, though it is out of reach, is the standard of hope.

The existence of a capacity, cherished and quickened, is a pledge that it will find scope.

There will yet be, as we believe, a field for the exercise of every power which has been trained and not called into service. What has been consecrated cannot

be wasted:

Earn the means first—God surely will contrive
Use for our earning.

The preparation and discipline of intellect is subordinate to the preparation and discipline of feeling.

The end of life is learning love-the learning Godand that in a large degree through human fellowship. Omne vivum ex vivo-" life is the one source of life". is an axiom true in the spiritual as in the physical order.

An intellectual result may be the occasion, but it cannot be the source of a moral quickening.

And what does the poet say of the end? For that which is evil there is judgment of utter destruction; for that which is good, purifying. So it is that chastisement is often seen to come through the noblest part of a character otherwise mean, because in that there is yet hope :

You were punished in the very part
That looked most pure of speck,—the honest love
Betrayed you,-did love seem most worthy pains,
Challenge such purging, as ordained survive
When all the rest of you was done with?

And on the whole

There shall never be one lost good! what was shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in heaven a perfect round.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once; we shall hear it by-and-by.

These thoughts interpret the fulness of our lives, our trials and falls and aspirations, and help us to understand better some parts of our Faith in which alone, as far as I can see, they find their solid foundation.

STEPS IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

ADDING on your part all diligence, in your faith provide virtue; and in your virtue knowledge; and in your knowledge self-control; and in your self-control patience; and in your patience godliness; and in your godliness love of the brethren; and in your love of the brethren love (2 Peter i.)

Bringing all Diligence WE are apt to live at random.

We are swayed by

the circumstances which we ought to control. We find it a relief when we are spared (as we think) the necessity for reflection or decision: a book lightly taken up, a friend's visit, a fixed engagement, fill up the day with fragments; and day follows day as a mere addition. There is

no living idea to unite and harmonise the whole.

Of course we cannot make, or to any great extent modify, the conditions under which we have to act; but we can consciously render them tributary to one high purpose. We can regard them habitually in the light of our supreme end.

En your Faith supply Virtue

HEATHEN philosophers had drawn a noble ideal of what man ought to be. The Gospel-the Truth—