had never suspected, staying down among the flats. Friends, I would not like to think of heaven as in any sense a finality. If, when old Bunyan's Christian went in at those golden gates, he gave up a great hope for a great possession, then, knowing what I do, and only what I do, I pity him. it was Young men and women, with this life mainly before you, get this hope. I have had twenty years more of life than you have; and, if I could tell you some of it that can only be known where no secrets are hid, you would acknowledge as hard for me as it ever can be for you. I call back to you from my vantage-ground of twenty years, and beseech you to bring, with a great faith, a great hope; to make sure, that there is not a day you can live, bending over your work, with a sad sense perhaps that the life is going out of you in the merest necessity of living, but brings you nearer to some divine surprise of blessing, some great unfolding of God's very glory. Men and women in middle life, as I am; with the bloom gone from some things that seemed very beautiful, as they lay glistening in the dew of the morning; with ashes for beauty, yonder in the cemetery; and with a dumb, daily care about things that must be cared for; with children. growing up, for whose future you plan and pray ; with a faith still in the things from which the bloom has gone, and that God, who has given you ashes for beauty, will some time give you beauty for ashes; that things will come right generally at last, and that the children will some time scramble into the right place as you did,—I charge you, as one to whom God has entrusted the keys, the sense and faculty of realizing that his dark ways open, -to take for your helmet the hope of salvation. Whatever you do, never let a painful inspection rob you of a great expectation. If, as you live, you try to live faithfully, then, as the Lord liveth, try to live hopefully, or you will miss the better half of your living. Do you go to your graves these winter days, and observe how the flowers you tended there last summer are dead, and think of other and fairer dead, of which those were but the poor intimation. For the sake of all that can fill you with the everlasting life, open your heart to the sense of that spring-tide, sure to rise, when the sun comes back; and tell your soul, that is but the intimation also of the spring-tide poor David Gray sang about, as he lay a-dying, in the first bloom of his life, "There is life with God In other kingdoms of a sweeter air: So may all sing, if to an inreaching faith they will add an outlooking hope, - will know that this flutter of the heart, that causes them to open their eyes wide, reaches for its fruition into certainties immutable as heaven. VIII. LOVE. 1 COR. xiii. 13: "Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." IT was my lot lately to speak to you about two prime things in our life,— Faith and Hope. One other thing still remains to be considered, Love; in Paul's estimation, the essence of all professions and possessions in religion whatever. I want to speak to you of this greatest thing now; to try and tell you what it is, what it can do, and so what we are, if we possess it; and, by consequence, what we are not if we do not possess it, though we may have every thing beside that earth and heaven can give. In the text, the word is translated charity. It is a term that touches, at the best, only one little corner of love. In Wickliffe's time, however, from whose Bible this translation was adopted into our version, love and charity were as nearly related as charity and benevolence are now. This can be understood, if we will remember that charity and dear, in the sense of precious, belong to the one root. They spring from what was common enough when they were born, — dearth or scarcity. Food was then precious, much esteemed, much loved. The generation to which my grandfather belonged had some such idea as this. They lived through a time when a succession of bad seasons, and a wasteful war, had reduced the whole working population of England to miserable black bread. Then good bread, sound and white, was dear; not as it is now to us in money value merely, but in this primitive value of something to love, a small piece being given to the children sometimes on a Sunday, as a very precious thing. In that way, we get at the old meaning of this word charity. Five hundred years ago, it was so understood generally, as to warrant its adoption by Wickliffe in preference to love. In that sense, Milton still uses it, three hundred years after, in "Paradise Lost," in the lines, "Which of ye will be mortal, to redeem Dwells in all heaven a charity so dear?" And Dr. Samuel Clarke still later says, "Charity |