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written on the broad sky an illustration of his own perfections. GOD IS LIGHT. The light of holiness shines forth in Him, the chief of all his perfections, and blending all in itself. Hence the majestic thought that the Son of righteousness should arise with healing in his beams. The Hebrew prophets were poets. Their language often rises to the highest style of poetry, and that of the purest, divinest kind, because it is in the thought, the sentiment, the sense, and not in painted words, or meretricious sentences, that their power consists. Campbell* the poet says: "The earliest place in the history of poetry is due to the Hebrew muse. . . . Indeed, the more we contemplate the Old Testament, the more we shall be struck with the solitary grandeur in which it stands as an historical monument amid the waste of time." So completely is the spirit of poetry and of eloquence intermingled in the compositions of the Hebrew prophets, that the critics are undecided whether to class them as orators or poets.

Painting has been called the poetry of colors. Now when the masters would produce the highest effects of their art, when they would seek the widest scope for their genius, what themes do they select? Those of INSPIRATION. If it be inquired which are the most celebrated and most successful of the productions of Raphael, Rubens, Van Dyke, Paul Veronese, Salvator Rosa, Leonardo da Vinci, and painters of like elevated name, we shall find that they are the preaching of Paul at Athens, the death of John the Baptist, the judgment of Solomon, Saul at the tomb of Samuel, the miracles of Christ, the transfiguration, the crucifixion, the resurrection, the descent from the cross, the last supper, the last judgment. Mighty themes! How full of aliment for the most appetent, the most comprehensive genius! Would that they had not so often absorbed the spirituality in the poetry of Christianity. But whatever want of gospel faith might be in them,

*Lectures on Poetry.

it could not bereave Christianity of her divine honors.

We might proceed to select numerous illustra tions of our main thought. We might quote the example of our Saviour, who appealed to the lilies of the field, and the winged denizens of the air for lessons of instruction to men, thus causing an element of visible, poetic beauty to contribute to the strengthening of faith in God. In his prophetic delineations of the desolations of Jerusa lem, and the extinction of the Jewish State, he rises to awful heights of eloquence, painting the gloom and the grandeur of that tremendous period in colors most appalling. Tradition has multiplied the tragic circumstances, while fancy has heightened, if possible, the effect of the whole.*

In Paul's description of the resurrection, (1 Cor. 15,) we have a picture of the highest kind, not only as it respects the effect of the whole, but if we consider also its minute beauties; its striking contrasts, the lights and shades that harmonize so wondrously, the celestial and terrestrial; the earthly and the heavenly, the natural and the spiritual, the mortal and the immortal. ver. 40-44. Oh! that is a chapter to be read in heaven at the final Synod of the elect of God, when they shall have met to celebrate the victories over sin, death and hell therein described There are conceptions and descriptions fitted to set the soul on fire; glowing evidences that the doctrines and facts of Christianity are capable of awakening the noblest powers of the human soul, whether in the way of argumentation or description.

It may be added, that the sacred canon closes in a manner suited to the whole series of books. The sublimity of the Apocalypse is not chiefly owing to its "mysteries." Its clearest revelations are full of those "heavenly things," which may well absorb the soul of man or angel.

*Milman's Fall of Jerusalem.

THE hopes and fears of former years
Are with their flowers faded-
The friends of old, more dear than gold,

Are 'neath the willows shaded

But still in dreams, bright boyhood's themes
Will come with scenes forsaken-
Oh! when we dream of bliss supreme,
Why-why should we awaken?

The fairest flowers, the sweetest hours-
The forms we fondly cherish,
If loved too well, it seems a spell

That bids them fade and perish.
Our joys each day to grief give way,

Like dew-drops rudely skaken,
Oh! when we dream of bliss supreme,
Why-why should we awaken?

"FATHER in heaven! I have trusted thee hitherto, I will trust thee even to the end. With a heart breaking in death, I thank thee that thou hast taken one precious child already to thyself: my other, my only one, I leave with thee. Through the temptations, manifold and perilous, which will hereafter surround her earthly path, || no hand but thine can guide her in safety. Thou sympathizing Saviour, who knowest what it is to resist the devices of the Adversary, place around her the arms of thy tenderness. And when she lies down to die, may she be sustained by the same unshaken faith which upholdeth me; so that I, a blessed mother, may present myself before thee at last with exceeding joy and say, 'Here am I and the children whom Thou hast given me !'"

The pale hand pressed more heavily on the head of the awed child who stood in silent beauty beside the low couch, unconscious that she was listening to her mother's last prayer; for the closed eyes did not open again, and the faint vibrations had scarcely ceased upon the air, before the spirit of her who had awakened them was in heaven.

"Mother! dear, sweet mother!" said the child, who stood long with the still hand upon her head, pray for me again; I will listen, mother!" but there was no sound, no motion; and the little trembler put up her arms, and softly lifting down the passive hand, kissed the slender fingers. They were cold. The truth burst upon her mind in a moment; and what the dying mother had been laboring for days to make her darling understand, that God was going to take her away, she understood now.

A wild scream brought in the attendant from an adjoining room; she flew to the child, who had fallen upon the floor, and as she raised her, her eyes fell upon the bed; the cause of the alarm was explained. Those moveless features and that placid face betokened the struggle over; cept the fainting burden in her arms, alone with death; the dim presence of the shadowy angel, unseen, but felt, was only there. An hour later, and the little orphan, bewildered with grief, was lifted into a carriage and conveyed

and exshe was

away to another home in the same great city; nor was she permitted even once again to look upon her mother's beautiful clay.

The wide continent held but one family to whom the tie of relationship bound that lonely child; and to other hands than theirs would the departing mother have fain consigned her. For months past that mother had been a learner of strange and blessed lessons. Grief was "nurturing for the sky" another soul; and with an unsatisfied craving after more substantial comfort than the superstitious creed which had enthralled her, had been able to yield, she turned elsewhere for solace, and found more than she had dreamed of seeking. She had been born and reared a merely nominal Protestant; but had married in her own country into a Roman Catholic family, and had become so fascinated with the gorgeous ritual of the false religion, as to turn with distaste from the seemingly stern forms of her own, of whose spirit and tenets she was alike ignorant. Death came and wrote "strange defeature" on the face of her youngest born; she saw him snatched away at a blow; and then it was that she felt the need of a sustaining influence, which she vainly sought in the faith within whose pale she had suffered herself to be drawn. The broken heart turned its own agony into prayer; for oh! however thoughtless and self-dependent we may be in our hours of prosperity and joy, let but sore bereavements touch us in the tenderest point; let grief, for which there is no earthly alleviation, overwhelm us, and the proud spirit "yieldeth like a reed," and the lips that refused their meed of thanksgiving amidst a wealth of blessings, are not ashamed to come with the supplications wrung out by the poverty of heartdesolation. Her own childhood and the simple prayer often put up at the knee of a pious nurse came back with a strange distinctness to her memory. "And he took little children in his arms;" she had not forgotten those few words; and the indescribable charm they had for her, now that her child was taken, awakened a desire to read them again. She opened the sacred pages and read with a new vision; and as she read, the holy seed feel upon a soil prepared for its reception

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by the distilling dew of early memories, and the mellowing influence of sorrow's tears. Bitterer anguish far awaited her; an anguish compared with which, her first bereavement was as the summer rain to the destroying tempest. Her husband sickened and died; died too in the faith which she was in her heart abjuring. In an agony of distress which could find no adequate form of utterance, she spoke to the beloved one of a reliance on the merits of a Saviour, whom she herself hardly knew. But the priestly father came, and lulled the half-awakened soul into its old security, from which it could not be roused again. The viaticum was given, the holy chrism applied, and the spirit passed away in its delusion. In the wreck of hope and the absence of all earthly stay, the stricken mourner turned fully and truly to her God. The power of that religion whose imposing ceremonials had led her astray was forever broken.

At first she meditated a return to her own land; but death and time had done their work among those nearest to her there; and after all, she had but little heart now to enjoy what had ever been a circle of sad worldliness. The family of her husband's deceased brother offered her a home under their roof, but there the shadow of the giant superstition was ever present, and she could not do the only work now left for her, the training of her child in a religion which none of her husband's name had ever embraced.

Her desire now was to discover some quiet retreat to which she might retire, away from the vigilance she had begun to dread. That influence was exerted over her already, although she did not know the extent of it. It had thwarted her attempts at removal; it had brought to her the sister of charity in the garb of a sympathizing sharer in her sorrows, at whose solicitations the unsuspecting mourner had permitted her child to be the frequent companion of her walks, overcome by the irresistible plea, that the little creature was languishing for want of outdoor air.

But a dimness began to spread itself over the saddened eye, a lassitude weighed down her body; the twice bruised heart could not bear up against the blow; and when the unconscious preparation was perfected, the summons for release came. She was at first scarcely willing to die; she felt that life had just been begun in earnest by her. Could her child have been taken too, how pleasant it would have been to go! But if she left it undone, who would rear her for God? Yet faith at length triumphed; she committed her precious charge to the only persons to whom he could leave her, with a pleading prayer that they would permit her to be educated in the Pro

testant faith; a request she hardly dared to hope would be heeded by them, but which she solemnly made in the assurance that it would be heard on high. And who shall say that prayer is not omnipotent, or shall presume to limit its exercise, since it "moves the hand that moves the world?"

The orphaned Una G- was kneeling, according to the custom lately taught her, before a crucifix one evening, with a rosary in her hand, and as she dropped the beads one by one through her fingers, she repeated in a mechanical voice an ave after the zealous teacher who kneeled beside her. She paused in the midst of her occupation as if overtaken by a sudden thought. "But cousin Lila," said she, in a sort of musing tone, "it is not right for me to pray this way; I am going to be a Protestant."

Una raised her eyes wonderingly to her companion's face. Cousin Lila," she began, with slow emphasis, "I know my mother is in heaven. God made her holy before he took her away. She did not need to go to purgotary to be made holy. She told me she would die a Protestant, and that I should be one too. But who will tell me how? You cannot, nor aunt G-, nor Father Alison; oh! who will tell me how?"

"But do you know what it is to be a Protestant?"

"No, not now; my own dear mother tried to teach me, but I was not mindful, for I did not know she was going to die. I am sure though, that this is not the way she told me to pray. I wish I could remember all she said to me; oh ! how I wish I could remember!"—and burying her face in her cousin's lap, she burst into tears.

"You would not want to be a Protestant, Una, if you once understood what is meant by it. Long ago, in the purest ages of the church, there was no such thing as Protestantism. But men became tired of obeying all that God commands through the holy church. They pretended that they could understand the Bible without any assistance; so they put what construction they. pleased upon it, and made up a religion that required far less of them. All the church has been able to do ever since, has not driven this wicked heresy out of the world. Now, Una, you would not like to be a Protestant, I'm sure." "But my mother told me she was one, and I know she is an angel in heaven."

"No, no, Una; your mother was not a Protestant, for she committed you to our care. Besides, you know that sickness had distracted her mind; and if she said so, it was when she did not know what she was saying."

An expression of deeper thought gathered in the eyes that still glistened with tears, and for some moments Una was silent.

"But when she used to put her arm around me, and make me kneel too, while she read out of the Bible-oh! cousin Lila, she knew what she was saying then. Why did aunt G- give my mother's Bible to Father Alison ?"

"Because you are but a little ignorant child, and we are all sinful creatures that could never find out what God means to teach us in his word, if our holy church did not explain it. It would be dangerous for us to pry into God's mysteries without any guide but our own weak judgments. The Bible is too hard for us to understand."

"Oh no, it was not hard. If you only knew, cousin Lila, how sweetly it spoke of 'the little children;' I understood that. Why cannot I read it again?"

Surely an angel had been sent to "trouble the waters" in the fount of that young heart!

Many and more specious arguments were thrown by this sincere follower of a blind faith upon the spark of Protestantism before it could be smothered in the mind of the little inquirer. But by degrees she grew satisfied, and consented to finish her evening devotion with the proscribed

ave sanctissima.

As the elementary studies of childhood gave way to the eager researches of a rapidly maturing mind, more alluring food was offered to the young investigator. Her attention was turned to the antiquity of Catholicism; to its triumphs; to the holy lives of its confessors and martyrs; to the self-denying labors of its missionaries; the zeal of its holy orders; their renunciation of all worldliness. As these lessons were poured into her ear, her enthusiasm began to kindle with all a neophyte's ardor. Yet she was not long an unquestioning learner. The grain of truth deposited by the saint in heaven was kept from being choked by the tares afterwards sown, through the haunting remembrance of the beloved one's parting prayer.

"Aunt G-," said Una, one day as she threw herself on a cushion at her aunt's feet, "I almost envy you; you seem to have no doubts about our religion."

"Doubts, my child! why should I have any? If they trouble you, resist them, for they are the suggestions of Satan."

"I have thought that they might perhaps be

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nothing more; but to-day I had some of them confirmed by a volume I have been reading”— "Some of the thousand fabrications of our heretical enemies, I dare say."

"No, no; it was simple Spanish history; but I learned from it that our Church has been a persecuting one—indeed, if history be true, a bloody one."

"The blessed Mother forgive you, Una, for the unholy thought! No, the Church, as a Church, does not persecute; though sometimes the ardent zeal of some of her members has betrayed them into undue violence; but for that she is not answerable. Besides, you forget that with that sterner age has passed away that sterner character which it was necessary the Church should then wear"

"Did she not establish the Inquisition?" interrupted Una.

"Do you not know," replied her aunt, warmly, "that when the power of the Church was at its height, there was no Inquisition? The alarming inroads of heresy made such an efficient check necessary; but it was not the terrible thing Protestant writers would have you believe. Remember that everything from that source in regard to our Church, must be received with allow

Una's education went on. The poetry of religion began to take a deep hold upon her imaginative character. The poetry of religion! How many are there who have known of it nothing more! Who have gazed with awe at the magnificent proportions of the temple, yet entered not to lay any sacrifice upon its altar, or, if they entered, hung with delight over the carved chapiters of lily-work," and the "bells and pomegranates overlaid with pure gold," but knew not of the existence of the "holy of holies!" How many are there who have sat as worshippers, and under the belief that their spirits were lost in absorbing adoration, have listened in a state of dreamy deliciousness to the majestic swell of the music, as the rich sound deepened into a strain of triumph, or died away to the subdued utterings of an overburdened soul, without having truly echoed one pæan of praise,

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or breathed one sigh of contrition! How many who have hearkened to the pleading accents of impassioned prayer, till the heart thrilled with its touching eloquence, and the tears trembled upon the eyelash at the angel-like sweetness of the tone, yet whose knees bowed not in their own secret chambers, and whose eyes never wept at the remembrance of their own errors. But the influence of such feelings did not leave Una's spirit satisfied. She was too thoughtful, too earnest, to remain content that her sensibilities, her imagination, her love of the touching, the graceful, the beautiful, should be all that was appealed to. While she turned with distaste from the common pursuits and evanescent pleasures of the world about her, she felt that this distaste of a mind whose immortal appetite craved something more than mortal sustenance -this longing after the spiritualized and elevated this absorption of sense in the externals of religion, was not religion itself. Heaven was not to her a heaven which, as her Church taught her, her own merits could attain. Her merits! She shrank from the conception that aught she could do could ever win a blessedness so glorious. In outward seeming, her life had been pure and blameless; but she knew that there existed an antagonism between her nature and the essential holiness of God's, which no obedience, no expiation of her own could reconcile. Again and again would she spread her hassock before a picture of rare beauty that hung in her chamber; but as often as she attempted to seek the mediation of the Madonna, whose meek eyes rested lovingly upon her, a shadow seemed to interpose between her and the sweet face of the Virgin Mother; but it left still undimmed "the child Jesus." That shadow-was it thrown by the cloud of doubt that hung round her own struggling spirit? Or was it the wing of the angel-mother that spread itself at such a time between her and the pictured object of her intended adoration?

The city clocks had one by one tolled out the midnight hour; yet still the sweet Una knelt before the altar in the family chapel-the impersonation of a votaress of heaven. The moonlight, streaming through the stained glass window, shed over her a flood of strange glory. The rich hair flung back from the pale brow— || the pleading eyes, filled with more than earthly beauty-the slight fingers clasped upon the bosom-the subdued expression of the willowy figure-might have formed the original of the Magdalen of the old master. She had been chanting a penitential psalm in low, broken harmony, and as the lingering vibration of the

organ died away, her thoughts found voice again. "Oh! it is in vain that a human soul attempts to work out its own salvation! How can I know that the saints in glory will listen to the supplications of an humble child, far away alone amidst the world's sinfulness? I have tried to be indifferent until I should grow older, and could better trust my own judgment; for however I strive to make it bow to the dictates of our holy Church-it will not-it will not. Obedience, they tell me, is all that is required. I have obeyed; I have persisted against doubts and fears; but I have gone on in a blind path. I am willing to be guided by my confessor, and to believe that he is to me in God's stead; but he is not earnest enough; he turns my inquiries aside; he discourages investigation; he forbids me the Bible; he gives me no rock on which my faith can rest. Yet all these struggles may be, as he assures me, the insidious workings of a too curious and restless spirit."

Her head drooped upon her bosom; her arms fell listlessly at her side, and she sat with the shadow of the cross falling in a darkened line across her closed eyes-a picture of utter despondency. So young, so isolated, so sorrowful! Sweet Una! shalt thou never find that for which thou art surely seeking? Shall the cross continue to throw, as now, dimness, instead of brightness, over thy vision? Shall no hand lift thee up, thou lone lamb, and tenderly carry thee to the fold of the good shepherd?

She raised the shading lashes, still heavy with tears, and her eyes fell upon an "Ecce Homo" that hung over the altar. The magic of the moonlight gave a startling vividness to the Saviour's suffering face. The raised eyes still seemed to wear the gaze of agony which said in stronger language than spoken words could utter, "Father, if it be possible;" but around the parted lips lay that expression of immeasurable compassion and unshaken endurance which added, "Not my will, but thine be done!" Saviour!" breathed the low, trembling voice, "thou surely didst undergo anguish unutterable! For whom? For what? It must have been that thou mightest pay the awful price of man's redemption. And if a God so suffered, can the work be incomplete? In the inconceivable depths of an expiation so wonderful, what would be all the penances, and fastings, and prayers, of all the millions who have sinned? and where would be their need? I see, I feel that the work is entirely thine-man can do nothing. Oh! he dare not join his paltry endurance with thine 'exceeding sorrow !'"

An eye and ear etherealized above corporeal