with trembling step, his soul never swept with the gales of Divine Love. But in another world, if not in this, the inner man must come forth and meet its own dismal retributions. These artificial motives cease to act, our sham-work falls away from us, and the natural heart appears just as it is, and fills its sphere of life with its own hideous shapings and colorings. And yet many a timid believer has been driven into some grim-looking "ark of safety," to escape from the fire-storms which were expected to come down upon all who remained outside. They are safe from the storms without, but not from the pent-up magazines within. That religion is the most safe, and that discipline the most merciful, which explores the heart most thoroughly, and pours the noontide into its chambers.

Have you, reader, ever experienced a great sorrow? and if so, have you not seen afterwards how it discloses heights and depths in your spiritual nature which you had never known, and resources upon which you had never drawn; how it produces susceptibilities which you had never before felt; how it induces a tenderness of mind that makes it ductile almost as the clay, and ready to receive the stamp of the Divine image; how little animosities and hatreds are banished and forgotten, while the heart has new yearnings towards all that live, and especially towards all that suffer; how the soul sickens at mere shows and appearances, and demands realities, while it hungers after the good and the true; how this world recedes and grows less,

while the world of immortality comes on as if now first revealed, and incloses you in its light, just as, when the glare of the day is withdrawn, and the darkness moves over us, we gaze on a new sky, and bathe in the starry splendors of the Milky Way?

CHAPTER V.

THE BOOKS OPENED.

"There was silence, and I heard a voice.”—Job iv. 16.

PERHAPS We are as little given to meditation and solitude as any people on the face of the earth. And yet among the most important aids to self-knowledge are the holy ministries of silence; and there cannot be self-inspection at all without it. People must have, they think, one of three things, books, company, or business, else time is lost and the hours drag heavily along. Their minds must be taken up with other people's thoughts, with the clatter of words, or with the plunge into affairs. Even religious exercises, as they are often conducted, tend more to hide the individual heart than to reveal it. The world is full of noise, and there is as much noise about religion as about business, and sometimes a great deal more. When one is always seeking to get a quantity of emotion poured into him, that he may pour it out again, or to have his heart-strings played upon among sympathizing crowds, he will often think he has "got religion," till in some hour of solitary temptation or midnight silence he finds his true self had

been lost sight of, and that in the midst of numbers he had failed to hear the most internal beatings of his own heart.

Has the question never pressed painfully upon the reader, What manner of person shall I find myself when death has torn away all the concealments of sensible things and I stand alone with God? What might I see if my heart of hearts were to symbolize itself before me, and I saw all its secrets standing' out like pictures on the wall? Paul even had revolved this question anxiously, lest, having preached unto others, he himself should be cast away. We have the means of obtaining answers to these questions which shall not be altogether indistinct.

We shall find, by a little experiment and analysis, that the thoughts, images, and feelings that we have, come from two very different sources. First, they are suggested or forced upon us from without. They are poured in upon us from natural objects, from engrossing affairs, from converse with books and men. None of these trains of thought and feeling are strictly and entirely ours. They were put into us; and it may be that they have overlaid and concealed our deeper affections and sentiments. But there is another source of thought and imagery, and that is, our hearts in their spontaneous workings. When these thoughts and images come solely from within, when there is no sound and no object to suggest them and they arise of themselves and come up throng after throng through the brain, we may know that they originate in the life-cells of our being, and

1

that they wear the colors of our own affections. We never know so well what is in us as in such moods as these. In order to this, all external things must be shut out from the sight and all sounds must die upon the ear. For this very purpose Providence has arranged the economy of our affairs, that the noise and the silence shall alternate each with the other, for at the close of every day he arrests the busy throng and hangs around the curtains of darkness, and there is no voice in the streets and no sound of wheels and footsteps;

"When fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds."

Would we know, therefore, whether the heart be clean within, and how it would be likely to appear when these outward swathings have been stripped from us and its hidden processes lie exposed? In an hour when the wings of silence are brooding upon the spirit, and all external scenery has been blotted out, watch the thoughts and fancies that come up from within! Be simply a spectator; let them come of themselves, and sweep away as they will. Then it might often be found, that he who thought himself regenerate would discover impure fountains in his heart; would see evil thoughts and corrupt imagery coming up out of it and thronging the chambers of the brain; would see memories coming back from places of forbidden pleasure, and looking pleasant as in days of old; would find that sin had its charms and lures, and that he rolled it as a sweet morsel under his tongue, that the whole style of

-