But when these were still, no

and the heart was warm. word came back to break the silence and reveal the future. It is faith in Christ, and that alone, which takes us beyond this earthly sphere, and speaks from the mysterious heavens in tones as articulate and clear as ever fall from mortal lips. The Lord's great promises all concerned his resurrection and return as the Comforter. For the first time in the world the heart feels and knows that death is not final, that its silence and mystery bear angel voices and ministries to the believer's soul. So Christ went away only that he might come again. So speedily did the Pentecost follow the crucifixion. And here where prophecy and fulfilment meet, the heart finds repose and rest. The disciple passes through these eras of the spiritual life, verifies them in his own experience, sees how they lie in his own soul, exact transcripts of the Gospel history, and how entire they are wrought into the Christian consciousness. The crucifixion and Pentecost, losing life and finding it, what other words so clearly proclaim "the victory of faith”

But faith in Christ is not only a central force and motive in the heart, it must also work out into the life. And here the field is the world. To believe in the Lord is to accept all duty, to become personally responsible for every cause of righteousness, to seek the relief of all suffering and woe and want. Your Master, he in whom you have all faith, passed no sorrow by, but went with the healing of his perfect love to every troubled heart. Go ye and do likewise. Joined to him, you must do his work and bear his cross. You must be inwardly determined on his service, and be able to verify in your own higher experience the heroic words of Paul, "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me." So life expands under the impulse of Christian faith, giving us the highest ideal of practical manhood. The genuine believer becomes the greatest man that lives; his being extends the farthest, and comprehends the most; it absorbs most out of this world, and has the strongest hold on the world to come.

Finally, "What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is he?" Once it was answered, "Son of David." And from time to time we hear repeated the same imperfect answer. But the words of Jesus also remain in which he forever vindicates his divine lineage as the Son of God. Accept only the words of the Pharisees, and you have no "advocate with the Father." Accept the words of Jesus, and you have a perfect humanity comprehended in "the Word that was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." There is a deep, practical earnestness in the question, Will you repose your faith in man, or in Immanuel? It is only when Christ rises into Lordship over the mind and heart, over this world and the next, that faith can rise into a divine power, embracing and consecrating our entire being, and making us heirs of immortality. And it is only when Christ, the Son of God, is formed within, that we pass from death unto life. Then, by faith in him, we also become sons and joint heirs of the same eternal inheritance. For the sake of your human affections and hopes let the Saviour represent the Divine mercy, and so draw you to the Father. Come therefore to Christ, put all your faith in him, that, "whether living or dying, you may be the Lord's. For to this end Christ both died and rose, that he might be Lord both of the dead and living."

STORE thy mind well with the best thoughts of others. Make them thy companions in the house, and by the way. Con them over in thy memory, while thou pliest the busy needle, or when thou performest thy heavier tasks. They will lighten the labor of thy hands in thy active days; and, should wearisome days and nights of sickness be appointed thee, thou wilt have with thee unwritten books of precious lore, which will beguile many a heavy hour. Whether it be the choice lines of gifted men, or the diviner Word of the Holy One, they will be as ministering angels around thy uneasy couch, and aid thee to bear cheerfully whatever God may send.

SONG OF THE HAMLET.

CALL us not poor, though naught have we

Of gold or silver ore;

Nor enter we the lordly hall,
Nor ring at rich man's door.

Call us not poor, though costly robe.
Ne'er from our shoulders hung;
Nor for our feet, in mazy dance,
His harp hath minstrel strung.

Call us not poor, though pomp and power
To us are words unknown;

And never for our humble name
Will fame's loud trump be blown.

But call us poor, and mean, and low,
If, in the early morn,

We walk not with the beautiful,

While earth seems newly born;

If we can press the dewy grass,
So richly strewn with flowers,
Without a pulse thrilled through with joy
For this sweet world of ours.

O, call us poor, if we can close
Our hearts to all the charms
That Nature pours so lavishly
Into our open arms!

Ay! winter's lovely pencilling

Upon our window traced

Gives truer pleasure to the heart,

Than if with damask graced.

"THE SUSPENSE AND RESTORATION OF FAITH."*

. It was a saying of the scholastics of the Middle Ages, that a thing is not well defined until you have told what it is not. And how often we see a bold and explicit negative performing, by reaction, the office of bringing into clearer relief the distinguishing principles of the Christian faith! Mr. Parker's" Experience as a Minister" will have its uses, at least in this respect if in no other. There were strong words needing to be spoken, about things as they exist, which he alone, perhaps, was exactly prepared to phrase and utter. Much that he tells us about God, and Right, and Conscience, and Duty, the religious perceptions assent to, while the heart rises up in response. But when he claims all this moral and spiritual light, now so brightly shining in our advanced Christian communities, illuminating the minds of the intelligent and wise, as the product of the human understanding, we shake our heads in doubt; and when he says further, that the great ideas and impulses of true religion-ideas of God and spiritual life, love to the Maker and the neighbor- are natural or native to man, as he is, without Divine interference, we open our eyes in wonder. Involuntarily, we picture Mr. Parker as he would have been if born and reared in the igloe of the Esquimaux, the kraal of the Kaffre, or the miserable earth-hut of the Fuegian; and we ask ourselves, What, then, would have been the ideas natural to him on these same subjects? And we turn to that early Christian nurture, of which he speaks, in a New England family, and to that constant teaching until his twenty-third year out of that old English Bible, as the sources whence his mind derived all that is valuable in it on these momentous themes.

* Theodore Parker's Experience as a Minister. - Theodore Parker, and his Theology, by James Freeman Clarke. - The Suspense of Faith, by Rev. Dr. Bellows. The Suspense and Restoration of Faith, by Rev. John Cotton Smith.