you; but always in a way which shall not interfere with your spiritual growth and development. He gave you passions, and they are just as sacred as any part of you, but they are to be under the strict control of your reason and your conscience. He gave you desires for earthly happiness. He planted in you the love of human praise, delight in society, the faculty to enjoy all His works. He gave you His works to enjoy, but you can only enjoy them truly when you regard them as blessings from the great Giver, to feed and not starve your higher natures. There is not a true joy in life which you are required to deprive yourself of, in being faithful to Him and His laws. Without obedience to law, your souls cannot be healthful, and it is only to a healthful soul that pleasure comes with its natural, its divine aroma. Is a nose stuffed with drugs capable of perceiving the delicate fragrance of the rose? Is the soul that intensifies its pleasures as an object of life capable of a healthful appreciation of even purely sensual pleasures? The idea of a man's enjoying life without religion is absurd.

I have been thus particular upon this point, because I love you, and because I know that without it, or independent of it, all my previous talk has very little significance. I have reasoned the thing to you on its merits, and I urge it upon your immediate attention, as a matter of duty and policy. The matter of duty you understand. I do not need Now about the policy.

to talk to you about that.

It will not be five years, probably, before every one of you will be involved, head and ears, in

business. Some of you are thus involved already. You grow hard as you grow older. You get habits of thought and life which incrust you. You become surrounded with associations which hold you, so that the longer you live without religion the worse it will be for you, and the less probable will be your adoption of a religious life. If you expect to be a man, you must begin now. It is so easy, comparatively, to do it now!

With this paragraph I cease to direct my words particularly to you. What I have said to you,

I have said heartily and conscientiously.

I shall

see you some time. very long, but if we all act the manly part we were sent here to act, and are true to God and ourselves, we shall be gathered into a great kingdom, whose throne will be occupied by the founder of our religion. During some golden hour of that cloudless day, sitting or straying upon some heavenly hill, watching upon the far-stretching plains the tented hosts of God's redeemed, or marking the shadow of an angel's flight across the bright mirror of the river of life, I shall say something about these letters to you. I shall look you in the face as I say it, to see if you are moved to an emotion of gratitude or of gratification; and if you should happen to tell me that they made you better, that they led you to a higher development, that they directed you to a manly and a godly life, I should press your hand, and if I should keep from weeping it would be more than I can do now.

We are none of us to live

LETTER VII.

A VISION OF LIFE AND ITS MEANING.

"And so, 'twixt joy,

And love, and tears, and whatsoever pain
Man fitly shares with man, these two grow old;
And, if indeed blest thoroughly, they die

In the same spot, and nigh the same good hour;
And setting suns look heavenly on their grave !

LEIGH HUNT.

SEE a young man standing at the opening gates of life, and with earnest eyes scanning the landscape that stretches before him. Flowers are springing at his feet among the velvet grass; brooks are dragging their chains of flashing silver over the rocks, and passing in careless frolic towards the sea; birds are fluttering like wind-tossed blossoms amid the overhanging foliage, and breathing their fragrant melody upon the air; breezes full of love are fanning his cheek, and filling him with a sense of intoxicating pleasure, and the sky is bending over him with no break of blue, save where, in the exalted perspective, golden clouds sit like crowns upon golden

mountains. His heart is bold, his limbs are strong, his blood is healthful, and his whole susceptible and sensuous nature throbs with responses to the appeals of the beauty and music and sweetness around and before him.

He takes a step, and Pleasure comes from her secret bower, and invites him to her banquet of delights. He pauses for a moment, shivers with the stress of the temptation, puts her resolutely aside, and passes on. Idleness, lolling beneath a shade, points to a vacant seat, and closes her languid eyes; but with disgust he leaves her and presses forward. Ambition beckons from some sudden summit, but he heeds her not. Then Duty comes, and standing before him-a firm and earnest figure-points to a burden and bids him take it up, and bear it as he journeys onward. He pauses, looks around, ahead, above, then lifts it to his shoulder, and with muscles firmly strained presses forward with new vigour. Soon he becomes accustomed to the load, and then Duty comes again, and bids him add to it. He willingly takes on the new burden, and, as he does so, finds his heart warming with cheerfulness, and his voice bursting into song. Revellers, steeped with wine and wild with hilarity, look up from their vine-covered table at the sound of the healthy lay, and laugh and scoff, but they do not approach him. Temptations that throng the path of the weak and faithless slink away from him without attack; or, if one scatter its charms upon him, they slide off like dew from bronze.

So Duty becomes to him a guiding angel. Wherever

she leads he follows. In her steps he drops into deep ravines, hidden from the light of the sun; he plunges into streams whose billows affright and chill him, and crosses them by a might which grows with every struggle; he scales mountains that lie in his path, piled with huge discouragements, and sees from the summit of achievement, glimmering in the distance, the streams of great reward, winding among meadows of heavenly recompense. At last he comes to a point in his way where he pauses, and looks around him. In the pause, he listens to the beating of his own heart. It is the thrill and rhythm of manhood which that heart is strongly telling. He sees that he has made progress towards the golden mountains, with their crowns of golden clouds. The noise of the revellers has died upon his ear. Pleasure and Indolence are far back, and the temptations of youth are past, and he is, so far, safe. He sees how the burdens he has borne, and the struggles he has put forth, have knit his muscles, and strengthened his will, and developed his power. He sees how each constituent of the manhood that has now become his choicest possession was won by toil and fatigue, and self-denial and patience, and resistance of temptation. He sees that it could have been won in no other way, and gives honest thanks to the Providence which has thus transmuted the evil of life into good.

There we leave him standing, and change the scene. At another gate a maiden enters. The rose sits upon her cheek, and the lily upon her bosom. Good angels are hovering all about her, and, seeking some crest