While this performance was going on-this travesty of a tragedy, this burlesque of a funeral-I was standing by the coffin of my friend and reading with exultation the words, "This mortal shall put on immortality: I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." And as I read I heard a voice from heaven saying, "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.”

In the evening of that day I stepped out of my own door, and a little way off I went into the house where ex-Governor Morgan was dying. He had held the helm of State, and sat in the Senate of the nation. But he was dying. Honor, power, wealth, were all worthless now. Yet his peace passed understanding: like a river, deep, great, rolling to the sea of infinite Love. He knew whom he believed, and was safe. I walked a few steps farther, and entered the mansion from which that day we had carried the body of Mr. Dodge to his burial. Was there wailing and weeping there? A holy quiet reigned in the halls; a pleasing greeting met me at the door; the blessed cheerfulness, born of love and faith and hope, pervaded the household like the fragrance of celestial flowers. My friend was not there in that graceful, cheery, loving form and face that made the house so bright a home. But his spirit was there: lingering in the hospitable rooms, among the pictures, by the warm hearths, and more than all in the hearts and words of those whom he loved, and left behind. We talked of him as of one lost indeed to sight, but not far away: with Jesus whom he loved, and who had prepared the place for him in a better house, a better country, whither we would soon go.

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Returning through the silent streets, I said to myself, All day among the dying and the dead, and I have not shed a tear. Death has been swallowed up in victory. God has wiped away all tears even now. For them who are dying in him, and them who are dead in him Christ will bring with him, and we shall be ever with them and the Lord."

This is the power and the joy of the gospel. That other thing that saith, "No preacher, tell Rob," I do not know,

nor care to know. It is the blackness of darkness into which the unbelieving spirit goes. For an atheist has a souľ. His unbelief does not rob him of an immortal soul. I do not want to die in that unfaith. But when my turn comes, let the preacher come, and standing by the coffin, say, "The Lord was his light and salvation: the Lord was the strength of his life and is his portion forever."

ILL-TIMED WIT.

IN a recent letter I sought to vindicate the ministers of religion from the charge of being gloomy, dismal, and miserable men. Perhaps I went too far and conveyed the impression that they are more merry than is meet, or not as sober-minded as becometh the gospel of the grace of God. When it was reported to the Bishop of a Church of England Idiocese that a certain rector was more a man of the world than he ought to be, he wrote to a well-known layman in the region and asked him if the rector's carriage and conversation were becoming his profession. To which the layman replied that he had had very little conversation with the rector, and he kept no carriage. But if these words have lost their early sense, they are still well enough understood by intelligent men. The carriage and conversation, the speech and behavior of every Christian, and especially of every Christian minister, ought to be in harmony with his profession. Consistency is a jewel. The origin of that phrase is so remote as to be lost in oblivion, showing that there never was a time in the history of man when consistency was not the ornament of character.

It is better to be stupid than witty, when wit is out of time and place. It is better not to laugh at all than to laugh when mirth is mockery. One of the wittiest of the early Puritan divines was the Rev. Mather Byles of Boston, a Tory in the Revolution, of whom many pages of entertaining stories are told. The jokes that he made were often excel

lent, and rarely flat. But he did not know when to keep them to himself. That was his misfortune and his fault. It was his ruling passion, and proved to be too strong in death. For on his dying bed he perpetrated a sorry and most untimely joke, for which he received one of the best and bestdeserved reproofs on record. The good Bishop Parker of Boston called to see Mr. Byles, and the dying man whispered in his ear:

“I have almost got to the world where there are no bishops."

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"Ah," replied the bishop, "I had hoped you were going to the Shepherd and Bishop of souls."

To make a play upon words on one's dying bed, to be merry at such a time, is so revolting to one's sense of propriety as to be positively shocking. And there are very few cases on record of folly so disgusting. No one admires the cool contempt of death which the dissolute Charles II. displayed when he apologized to his friends for being so long a time dying. In the presence of a greater King than himself, even the monarch of England might have been sober. Many quaint and ludicrous remarks of ministers, even at funerals, are the fruit of ignorance rather than intention. When he gave out a hymn at a funeral and stated that it was "selected by the corpse," the remark conveyed nothing ludicrous to the minister's mind, simply because he was too dull to see it in the light with which it flashed on the minds of others. I knew a pastor who held the two callings of preacher and butcher. He murdered the King's English in the pulpit, and killed oxen during the week. He was preaching the funeral sermon of a miserably deformed beggar who died in squalor, to the great relief of the community, and the preacher, looking down upon the dead, exclaimed, “The beauty and the glory of the man has departed forever." He had heard something like that at some other funeral and thought it quite a curl, without perceiving its incongruity when pronounced over the subject lying before him. Such blunders excite our pity. When unwise speakers forget themselves and their high calling so much as to indulge in

idle jesting in the pulpit, they are to be censured, not to be pitied. I was one of four or five speakers at a religious meeting in a crowded church. All the speakers who preceded me kept the audience in perpetual merriment with their funny stories and bright auroral coruscations. I strove, when it came my turn, to say some serious words in a serious way, and succeeded so well that the man who followed me assured the audience that such was not my usual style, but that I had as much fun in me as any of them. Actually he apologized for my good behavior in the pulpit. Cowper wrote "John Gilpin," and in the proper time and place could make merry; but Cowper said,

"Tis pitiful

To court a grin when you should woo a soul;

So did not Paul. Direct me to a quip

Or merry turn in all he ever wrote,

And I consent you take it for your text,

Your only one, till sides and benches fail.”

Father Taylor of Boston, the sailor preacher, having drifted beyond soundings, stopped suddenly and sang out, "Friends, I have lost my nominative case, but I am bound for the Kingdom." He soon regained his hold on the audience, and was once more at home with his theme. That was ready wit, and saved the speaker from embarrassment. No one could find fault with the preacher. But it was very poor wit and unworthy of the pulpit, when the same Mather Byles, of whom I wrote above, was disappointed in the coming of the Rev. Mr. Prince, who was to preach for him, and then took for his text, “Put not your trust in Princes." No amount of preaching, however eloquent or serious, can atone for such an abuse of the divine word. And that naturally leads to the remark that ministers, being familiar with the words of Holy Scripture, are tempted to use them in such connection as to associate them with light and trifling things, to their own injury and that of others. I have heard texts so used, and they are now inseparably tied to thoughts I wish were cleaned out of the mind. It hurt Mr. Nettleton, a

blessed man of God, in my youthful esteem, when he said, in a stage-coach, as I produced a cake for lunch, “There is a lad here who hath one loaf," whereat all the passengers laughed. Dean Swift and Sydney Smith shed no lustre on the pulpit or the profession which they followed. In other callings, and out of their own, they shone in society, and their wit has made them famous. But with all their acknowledged genius and elegant accomplishments, by which they kept "the table in a roar,” what good thing, as ministers of Christ, did either of them do, for which they will be honored when the Lord shall make up his jewels. And the men whose brilliant jests and amusing stories entertain an audience of immortal souls are not the preachers who win the most sinners to the Saviour. Let us not be too hard on them who have such a well of water bubbling up in them that they cannot help an occasional explosion, even at the most inopportune times and seasons. That is an infirmity of wit for which no remedy has been found. When a preacher was censured by his brethren for the bad habit of exaggeration, he assured them he "had often bitterly repented of it; it had cost him barrels of tears." For such a case there is no cure.

Some of the most genial, companionable, and jovial men whom I have ever known held their wits in such firm, yet easy control, that in general society they were not known to be men of humor, or specially addicted to pleasantries. They were gentlemen of broad and varied culture, familiar with elegant letters in many languages and ages, and able to bring from the well-arranged storehouse of fertile memory the most sparkling gems. Yet they did not scatter them carelessly, nor waste them on the common herd. Among congenial peers they were shining lights, and nights in their company were always brilliant and memorable. How many of them are now among the kings and saints in our Father's house! They join in

"The song of them that triumph,

The shout of them that feast."

The foam on the sea disappears, but the ocean, fathomless and boundless, rolls on. Wit that cheers and illumines the