they are themselves consumed. Thus is it with the bee, save that to it labor is thoughtless pleasure, and it has no perception of the aimlessness of its toil. It knows not, as I know, that the best which can befall it is to consume the golden store which it has taken so much time and labor to collect, and to begin with a new season the same round of activity. The toil of men, in like manner, only produces food; food only sustains the life the life returns to the production of the means of life, till other means are wanted to sustain it which cannot be found; and thus is toil vanity, the fruits of toil are vanity; life is vanity, and death is the vanity of vanities. Why then do we live?" No wonder I then sighed for death, hoping as I did to find by some unknown means a satisfying of my doubts, or a refuge from them. No wonder I dreamed of death by night, and strove to realize the conception of it by day. No wonder I hid my face from the light, and closed my ears to the murmuring waters, while I revolved every imagination I had ever formed of the darkness, and stillness, and immeasurable vastness of death. Yet then was I, perhaps, the most wretched. I could not divest myself of the conviction that my doubts were so many sins. Men told me, and I could not but in part believe, that to want faith was a crime; that misery like mine was but a qualification for punishment; and that every evil of which I now complained would be aggravated hereafter. Alas! what was to become of me, if I could find no rest even in the grave, if the death I longed for was to be only apparent, if the brightness which I found so oppressive here should prove only like the day-spring, in comparison with the glare of the eternal fires amidst which my spirit must stand hereafter? In such moments, feeling that there was no return to the ignorance of the child, or the apathy of common men, I prayed, to whom I knew not, - for mad

ness.

Blessed be God, I was led by another way out of my torment, a long, and dark, and rugged way, but one on which are perpetually echoed back the thanksgivings of a spirit now at peace. If it were not for the mementos around me, I could not credit how weak had been my reason, how perverted my imagination, or at how low a depth of ignorance. it has pleased the Father to fix the starting point whence the interminable career of the spirit must begin. I daily feel that I am still but beginning; that realities are discerned only in their faintest outlines, and the language of truth only caught in the most remote of its reverberations. I daily feel that God is yet to me less than the wisest and tenderest parent is to the infant who can barely recognise his presence,

who can rightly refer the voice and the smile, but knows nothing of any nobler attribute. I feel daily that Christ has but opened his mission to me, that Life and Death have only told me whence they come, and that I can but dimly discern whither they are leading me. But yet, infantine as is such a state, how much has been achieved, and how intense is my joy in the achievement, and my gratitude for the discipline under which it has been accomplished! Bear witness to this, all ye records of the feelings of my darker time, of the time when the order and beauty was yours, and the desolation mine! While nature is drawing a veil over the ruins of art, and plying her work the more diligently the longer man is absent, take from me another record of the things of the spirit. I now see no vanity, though there is much decay. Though the urn is overthrown, the spring welleth up to feed the life which flourishes around, and the foxglove and the bindweed grow where nothing blossomed before. The cistern is broken, so that the waters escape to diffuse themselves in the grass; but a new region of life is opened among the mosses on its brink, and in the damp nook whence yonder blue dragon-fly came forth. I see not

that there is less beauty in these alleys, because the periwinkle has strewed the way with blossomed shoots, or because the hollyhock has fallen from its support, or because the decaying leaves are not, like other mementos of mortality, removed from sight. The fruit-trees drop their degenerate produce, to be carried away by the field-mouse or devoured by birds, and the vine trails its clusters among the rank grass; but in all this there is no vanity, no failure of purpose, no breach of a tacit promise. According to our present conceptions, there may be less beauty, though even this is doubtful, but there is more life, and an allsufficient end in the influences at work on the human spirit. I come not here for analogies from which I might derive a presumptive belief in the truths which I could not formerly. admit. Those truths I have learned elsewhere on far superior evidence, and by a large variety of means. This is the place in which to rejoice in the comparison of what is now given with what was then withheld in the conviction that the Father has nowhere declared his children guilty, because they have not truly known him, while struggling to obtain the knowledge, and mourning their own ignorance. This is the place in which to retrace the progress from despair through the various degrees of doubt to hope, to belief, to assurance, to perpetual rejoicing and devout thanksgiving. Here, where I once doubted whether I had a Maker, and whether, if there were such an one, men did any thing but mock themselves in calling him Father, are the best witnesses of my avowal that I have found these doubts to be the result of human creeds, as far as they are impious, and that I have reached, through the very severity of the discipline, a refuge whence I can never again be driven forth into the chaos of the elements out of which

my new life has been framed. Human life has passed away from this one of its abodes, and the regrets which linger

serve but to confirm my faith in Him who led its dwellers to a far distant and better habitation. And if I could behold the entire earth made into one bright, beautiful garden for the whole race of men to dwell in, and if I could return when all were gone, and wander through its untended shades, I trust I should feel a thoughtful rejoicing in each record of past conflicts, and a solemn gratitude that the passing struggles of an earlier existence are appointed but as an introduction to the vast and indestructible privileges of a maturer state.

SABBATH MUSINGS.

VI.

A HERMIT'S CAVE.

THIS, then, is the cell consecrated by tradition to the service of God. Around the walls of this cave hangs a sanctity akin to that which hallowed the fastnesses of Judea, after the Saviour had been seen to issue from them. So think the dwellers below, who gaze with awe when the misty curtain of the morning is drawn up from its shadowy entrance and if they come hither to see where their saint spread his heathy couch, or shed for half a century his penitential tears, it is with somewhat of the same reverence that the youthful Hebrew convert must have felt when he overtook the Teacher, reposing himself in the clefted rock from the noonday heats, or watching the thunder cloud as it descended upon the valleys.-The feeling is not to be derided in the one case more than in the other, since it is only misplaced, and not factitious or absurd. The error relates to the object, and not to the emotions with which it

is contemplated. If I believed, like the priest-ridden flock below, that their saint was as lofty in soul as Paul, and as pure as John, I would come in the calmness of reason to worship where he had worshipped, and meditate where he had reposed. As it is, the difference between them and myself is, that the same emotion flows in another direction, and that I discern a kindred sanctity where they look not for it.

The place was not ill-chosen by the holy man, if the circumstances could but have been adapted to that highest worship the service of the life. All the natural objects around breathe praise; and the chorus might have been complete if the mighty voice of the affections had not been dumb. The ceaseless dash of the waterfall on a wintry day like this, the bleating of the flocks in spring, and the shepherd's call coming up from beside the fold, the flapping of wings when the eagle darts into the summer sky, and the anthems of the autumn winds, these are all praise; but they are no more than inarticulate melodies till the concords of human spirits are joined to them, converting them into the native language of angels. The lamps of this temple are also many and beautiful; the icicles that glitter in the cave's mouth; the rainbow that comes and goes as the sunbeams touch the spray and vanish; the mists of the valley that roll beneath the silver moon, and the tinted clouds that sail around her these in their turn light up this temple; but they are shifting, flickering, expiring flames; and there is yet wanting the altar of the human heart, on which alone a fire is kindled from above to shine in the faces of all true worshippers for ever. Where this flame, the glow of human love, is burning, there is the temple of Christian worship, be it only beside the humblest village hearth: where it has not been kindled, there is no sanctuary; and the loftiest amphitheatre of mountains, lighted up by the ever-burning