some of its memorial teachings, rather than to bring thither those commonplaces of death from which the wounded spirit as impatiently shrinks as from the outward trappings and pompous appendages of grief. Beside the wayside pillar we may pause to trace, if we will, His footprints who in human flesh trod oftentime the way “as thou comest to Ephrath ;" and who, unseen, sets His secret mark and seal upon the gravestones of His departed as upon treasure-chambers whereof He bears the key in His golden girdle.

It is impossible not to discern in many of those lamentations which may justly be called the Funeral Anthems of the Old Testament, a despondency and darkness which the dimly revealed light of promise but partially, and at intervals, served to dispel.

"Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. . . . His days are determined the number of his months are with Thee; Thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass. Turn from him that he may rest, until he shall accomplish as an hireling his day.

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For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof was old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground, yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dieth and wasteth away; yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up, so man lieth down and riseth not. Till the heavens be no more they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.. And surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place. The waters wear the stones; Thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth, and Thou destroyest the hope of man. Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passeth Thou changest his countenance and sendest him away. His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them.”

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A vivid sense of the intense definiteness of that line of demarcation which divides life from death, is the inwrought strain of feeling in the

patriarchal lament. "Where the tree falleth there it shall lie," was the cry of another sacred writer; but he who now engaged himself in testing the extension of hope to its furthest possibilities as regarded material vitality, carried its limits into a region of doubtfulness whereinto life, yet penetrating, might dispute the prey. "For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease But man dieth and wasteth away, yea, man giveth up the ghost; and where is he?"

The impassable gulf, the rigid line between life and death, with no interposition of a softening neutral ground-it is this which sends a shiver through the heart as we gaze upon our dead, this which seems to petrify the utterances of grief and to bewilder the faculties of the soul. To survey the features which answered to our every word, nay, to our every thought, and to realise that no responsive look can ever again disturb their marble placidity,- to be still, and beside the well-known form to recall the daily and hourly sayings and doings which made as much a part of our lives as our own,-the silence, the

stillness, the hopelessness of death, the utter irresponsiveness while we weep and lament, this it is which seems so hardly to throw the heart back upon itself with the realisation that no possibility of skill or power can reach across the boundaryline of separation, or bring back the faintest answering token from the regions beyond the frontier. From beyond that frontier to which we seem so near, from beyond those confines which we appeared to have reached hand-inhand, while we perceived not that our grasp was loosening, and that he, our other self, was no longer beside us, until we found ourselves alone and helpless, and before the barrier which is impassable.

And we cry out in sudden anguish, to hear but the echo of our own grief in reply: and we know that between us there is a great gulf fixed, a gulf of utter silence and complete separation; while the chill air from the icy regions of death penetrates to the inmost soul, freezing with its keen breath the fountains of our tears. It is then, and in such moments, that there is a mockery of our sore pain in the reviving blossoms of the drooping flower severed from its parent

stem. vive."

"Through the scent of water it will re

"If a man die, shall he live again ?"

And, yet further, the helplessness of man against the unseen, irresistible power of death, is that which has suggested many a strain in the dead-march harmonies of the Old Testament; many a strain, true as mournful, to which our hearts make echo now in weariness and pain. "There is no man that hath power over the spirit to retain the spirit; neither hath he power in the day of death: and there is no discharge in that war." "None of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him.” "For there is a man whose labour is in wisdom and in knowledge and in equity; yet to a man that hath not laboured therein shall he leave it for his portion." "All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again."

"There is no discharge in that war." In the old days of battle, the man who had built the new house and had not dedicated it, the man who had planted the vineyard and had not eaten thereof, the man who had betrothed a wife and had not taken her, and the man that was "fearful and fainthearted," was "let go to return unto his house,"