"And now my years are twenty-five,

And every mother hopes her lamb,
And every happy child alive,

May never be what now I am."

And then after lines of deep pathos and remorseful memory, he humbly adds :

"Of what men are, and why they are
So weak, so woefully beguiled,
Much have I learnt; but better far,

I know my soul is reconciled."

Once more, contrast this sorrow of bitter repentance with the hopeless, the cynical despair of these lines by a third poet-Lord Byron-on his thirty-third birthday :

"Through life's dull road, so dim and dirty,

1 have dragg'd to three-and-thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing, except thirty-three."

Who was it that wrote thus? He was a man of noble rank, of vigorous health, of great beauty, of splendid genius; how had he used these great gifts? Not for man's good-not for God's glory-not, oh not, as you will see, for his own happiness. Those gifts were squandered, that beauty defaced, that strength abused, that genius laid like incense on unhallowed altars. It began when he was a Harrow boy. He had been a bad boy, and he grew up into a godless man. And when the days of numbering came how unspeakably sad, how utterly heartrending they were. What a difference between the white ashes and the gray heart of Byron at thirty-three, or the deep remorse and humble penitence of Hartley Coleridge of twenty-five, and the calm nobleness and conscious strength of Milton at twenty-three! And in all Byron's later poems, however finely uttered, there is the same bitterness, the same despair; the same wail that the bloom of the heart has fled as fast as the

blush upon the cheek; that he has been driven over the shoals of guilt; that the magnet is lost, the sail shivered; that

"Oh could I feel as I have felt, or be as I have been,

Or weep, as I could orce have wept, in many a vanished scene!
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be,
So, 'midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me."

And on his very last birthday, but three months before his death, he writes, though still young :

You see it is all Mene, Mene-numbered, numbered. Ay, and it is Tekel too; weighed in the balances of God, weighed in the balances of the sanctuary, weighed even in the balances of his own judgment, he is found wanting. And oh, do not think that this is only the sorrow and the shipwreck of splendid genius! The wretchedest, craziest, most worthless shallop may be wrecked as hopelessly as the stateliest ship; and the meanest, dullest, stupidest, least-gifted schoolboy-as he may save his soul, and make it, through Christ's redemption, worthy to live with God, so may also lose his soul, with misery as intense and remorse as shameful-though he cannot utter them—as a poet or a king. Mene, Mene, Tekel, is for everyone of us: ay, and far away a voice peals forth in the distance, "Upharsin," "And they shall divide." Ay! be not deceived; good is not evil, and a state of sin is not a state of grace, and the angels shall divide the just from the wicked as the reapers divide wheat from tares. Oh then, if you would save many and many a future year, and the long

hereafter, from the scathing misery of vain remorse,—if you would not have the sole remembrance of your boyhood to be a bitter sigh-read that warning word on the walls of the inner temple-number ere God numbers— pray to Him, ere it be too late, "So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." October 17, 1875.

SERMON XXXIV.

THE COURAGE OF THE SAINTS POSSIBLE IN

BOYHOOD.

PSALM XVI. 3.

"All my delight is upon the saints, that are in the earth and upon such as excel in virtue."

ONE morning, among the high Alps, I happened to be on a glacier which lay deep beneath a circle of stupendous hills, when the first beam of sunrise smote the highest summit of Monte Rosa. As I gazed from the yet unbroken darkness of the valley, so vivid was the lustre of that ray of gold upon the snow, that it looked like a flame of intensest crimson; and even while I gazed, the whole "pomp and prodigality of heaven" began to be unfolded before me. Until they burned like watchfires of advancing angels, mountain-crest after mountain-crest caught the risen splendour, and it flowed down their mighty crags in rivers of ever-broadening gold, until not only was the East full of glory and flame, but the West too echoed back the dawn in bright reflection, and the peaks which had caught the earliest blaze were lost in blue sky and boundless light,—and it was day. I never think of the Saints of God without their recalling to my memory those sunlit hills. We

may be wandering in the dangerous darkness; but they are the proof that the Sun has risen,-they are the

M.S.

Z

prophecy of the lingering day. And hence, to-morrow -which is All Saints' Day-is a day which I can never pass unnoticed,—a day which imperiously dictates the subject of the Sermon. But though that subject be embarrassing from its very vastness, yet, if I do nothing else, I shall regard it as a good end gained, by God's blessing, if I teach you to think much of All Saints' Day, and never to let it pass without trying to realize its noble lessons. It will be something to have quickened your "delight in the saints that are in the earth, and in them that excel in virtue." For while the world says, "Be as others are; do what others do; think as others think; let custom lie upon you heavy as death; leave not my beaten path, or you will be prosecuted;" Christ, on the other hand, says, "Follow not the multitude to do evil; aim at that only which is greatest; strive for that only which is best; be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect." And oh, it is good for us thus to lift up our eyes unto the hills! It is good for us in the midst of lives so inconsistent, so dwarfed, so conventional as ours, to bear in mind how much greater and better others have been;-how dauntlessly good, how magnificently victorious over vice and sin. Their high examples teach us how we may rise above our nothingness;-how little we are when we live the selfish life of the world; how great we may be, if we live as the Sons of God.

I. Once get this view of things, the view that we read of the good, and wise, and holy, only that we may strive to become like them,-and then all History, all Biography, will become to you radiant with bright examples. No virtue will lack its illustration; no age its glory. Among the many many reasons why it is most desirable that you should not only read more, but