hard, real, biting torment, to the tender child. It shuts out heaven and opens hell to him; it is cruel, cruel, cruel, as the hissing and biting of serpents, to some delicate, small souls. I suffered more agony at one time in my childhood, when a revivalist got hold of me, and made me believe I might wake up in hell when I laid my poor little head on the pillow, tired to death of my fears, than from any other thing that ever struck me. There is the way to do a fatal mischief, the way the seeds of infidelity are sown in many a noble nature. It is simply the revolt at, the resistance to, and the rejection of, a God the nature is too large and sweet and tender to tolerate. If, in these early days, there is no day-star of a lovelier light, no dawning for the small bright soul of a better day, then there may be no chance for that soul to pass into the kingdom until it has passed out of the world. I had a very touching letter not long ago from an army officer away out on the frontier. He told me how he had gone through sore trouble for his soul's sake, but had somehow felt his way out of the great grim shadows into a sunny peace and rest. “I have little children," he said, “and I want them to be trained up within this better life and light from the start, but I am a poor hand to pray and teach them; I am not sure I can do it if I try; and so will you please send me some good little manual to help along out to the fort?" That good man has got hold of the clew: those children will be led softly. The secret of the Lord is in the gentle, soldierly heart: they will rise up to call him blessed. There will be no revolt from the heaven which bends over those tender natures, no turning away from the infinite love, no terror of the eternal torment: their religion will be part and parcel of their very life. And then, when we have done all this, I know of nothing better beside, than that we shall put the whole wealth of our endeavor back into the hands of God in the spirit of this prayer of Schiller's father for his son : — "O God, thou knowest my poverty in good gifts for my son's inheritance. Graciously permit that even as the want of bread became to thy son's hunger-stricken flock in the wilderness the pledge of overflowing abundance, so likewise my darkness may in its sad extremity carry with it the measure of thy unfathomable light. And, because I cannot give to my son the least of blessings, do thou give the greatest; because in my hands there is not any thing, do thou pour out all things from thine. And this temple of a new-born spirit, which I cannot adorn even with earthly ornaments of dust and ashes, do thou irradiate with the celestial adornment of thy presence, and finally with that peace which passeth all understanding." THE BURDEN OF AN OLD SONG. IF preachers ever exhaust the Bible, so that they must find a new store of texts to preach from, I think this is sure to be one of them, "There is no place like home." In the heart of a grain of wheat the miller tells me there is one spot of a golden cast, which is the reason for a certain delicate golden hue, if you grind the wheat for bread, and if you sow it, there lies the germ of all the harvests. What that germ is to the grain, the home is to the man. Strip away the enfolding nurture, and bare him to the heart of his being, and there you find the golden spot which colors all, and is the living germ for harvests that are yet to be. In my last journey to Europe I went through a part of Scotland, which seemed to me to be about as wild a land as one would wish to see, just rock and heather, with tumbling seas for a setting, and here and there a reach of green country on which, |