drink in the light of truth, is an endeavour, not less, to hand it on. Every half-hour spent in earnest prayer to God for forgiveness and grace, has a direct tendency to spread the saving influence to others also. Every life changed from darkness to light, is at once and of its own accord, a missionary life. Men take knowledge of such a person, that he has been with Jesus. It is his business to let his light shine: but, do what he will, if the light is there, it cannot be hid. It does impress men, it does solemnise, it does awe, it does influence, it does attract, to see the fruit of the Spirit shown in a life. "Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance," these things are signs also: these things are that clear shining of the candle which gives light to all that are in the house: these things, not counterfeited but real-these things, acquired (as they can only be acquired) at the footstool of a throne of gracemake the light received a light also transmitted: they do glorify a Father in heaven, by showing that He indeed is, and is that He is-Almighty, allloving, all-holy, swift to hear, and prompt to save! "Arise-Shine." Arise-for there is work to do, and the day of earth is far spent. Arise-for there is a God above, and a heaven beyond: a God with whom we have to do, and a heaven which can be lost or won. Arise-for death works in us as we are, and He only can quicken souls, who first raised up his Son Jesus. Shine for thy light is come, and yet a little while is it with you. Away with all screens and all disguises, and let the light shine into your souls with its comforting and cleansing and quickening life. Shine-for the light received must also be manifested; set not under the bushel of indolence or unconcern, but rather on the candlestick of the life, that they who enter in may see the light. C. J. VAUGHAN. OMAR AND THE PERSIAN. THE victor stood beside the spoil, and by the grinning dead. The victor spoke, "Thou, Persian dog! hast cost more lives than thine; That was thy will, and thou shouldst die full thrice, if I had mine. Dost know thy fate, thy just reward?" The Persian bent his head, "I know both sides of victory, and only grieve," he said, "Because there will be none to fight 'gainst thee, when I am dead. UNHEALTHY HUMOUR. UNHEALTHY HUMOUR. [Good Words, Feb. 1, 1867. torture, were pressed into the service of the rol- of the manners of the time, we can hardly feel sur- generally, after the manager has suggested that the manager ventures upon a mild remonstrance. tone, walking out of the room amongst the wings courage from his brother actor, stands up manfully "I hope, sir, you don't intend to cut my gout." "I can't afford to lose a bit of it," returns Mr. Gills, getting a little excited. We are so essentially a humorous people, with such a passion for reducing everything to an absurdity, that murder, arson, or any other desperate crime is hardly considered too serious to be spun into amusement. As for diseases, there are very few, however painful and fatal they may be in the main, which, in some of their aspects, are not considered fair game for the comic writer. The gout has long been an established favourite in farces, comedies, and caricatures; its agonies have been played upon with an unmistakable relish, and delighted audiences have approved of mock torture as a highly humorous representation. Toothache, for some unexplained reason, has never been very popular on the stage, probably because it has never been, rightly or wrongly, associated with over eating and drinking. Paralysis has been left alone, though it once gave a richness of tone to a celebrated actor: and we are not aware that any attempt has been ever made to extract fun from the ague. Consumption has been well worked on its sentimental side; but there must be a comic aspect, if diligent searchers will only seek it. The plague has been represented to a British audience with very equivocal success, but the persevering dramatist should not be disheartened by a single failure. St. Vitus's dance was at one time the most attractive feature of a smart and bustling ballet, and various kinds of deformity, from a limp to a dislocated leg, give a fantastic spirit to our popular music-hall dancing. Even in a higher walk of the drama-in modern comedy-the most idolised comedian of the day has invented an elaborate stutter, which he talked with every night for four or five years. The cholera, except in its mildest forms, has not been used as an agent to excite laughter; but seasickness, influenza, and a variety of similar complaints, are hardly ever off the stage at one theatre or another. Sea-sickness, particularly if properly handled, is better than all the wit of Swift or the humour of Smollett. It is no check to the mirth to know that people have died of this very funny com. plaint; there are weak people in the world who would die of anything. A wooden leg and the physical discomfort it leads to, can always be relied on for provoking merriment; while a broken head, if treated judiciously, can be made vastly amusing. Hanging is an operation that has its ludicrous side, which writers like Charles Lamb, and dramatists like Punch-and-Judy-show workers, have not been slow to discover. Those who remember the rather overrated sketches of Seymour, the caricaturist, will also recollect how large a portion of their fun was got out of practical, not to say cruel, incidents. The biting teeth of a man-trap, a bursting blunderbuss, the threatening shadow of a gipsy's bludgeon, the spikes and broken bottles of a garden-wall, a runaway horse, a broken-down chaise, a savage bull-dog, and a thousand other instruments of breakfast-table. with the action of the piece, and you don't get much Gills. "If you'd been in front last night, and had think when boy kicks leg-" "Very well," returns the manager, "let it stand; but what about the tea-urn scene?" resignation, "if you touch that, I'd better resign "Oh!" replies Mr. Gills, with an air of affected the part." 66 "It's too long," says the manager, firmly. "Do you think so?" mildly inquires the author; tion, in my humble opinion, ought to be preserved." we may prune the dialogue a little, but the situa and, without prying farther into the council of the The situation is preserved, as a matter of course, green-room, we can easily imagine what that situation is. Given a tea-urn and a gouty man upon the stage, and it is required to know what a popular dramatist will do with them. The gouty man, stout, red-faced, helpless, testy, and much padded about the legs, will be wheeled on in a chair by the comic servant, and fixed at the A tea-urn will then be brought in, foaming like a brewhouse copper, and placed upon the table, when the comic servant will withdraw. After a few seconds, taken up with speaking and the business of the table, the gouty man will | find the water dripping rapidly from the tea-urn upon the worst of his two lame legs, which it is totally out of his power to move. He cannot reach a bell, and he therefore knocks violently on the floor with a thick stick, the audience in the meantime | roaring with delight when they are made fully aware of the humour of the position. After a most unwarrantable delay, the comic servant makes his appearance with anything but signs of pity and contrition upon his countenance. He pretends to be nearly bursting with half-concealed laughter, at which the audience shout in sympathy. When he condescends to recover his speech, and addresses his afflicted master, who is suffering from a painful disease most painfully aggravated by his gross neglect, instead of asking pardon he says, in the tone of an injured and unappreciated servant, "If I don't give satisfaction, I'd better leave!" While this sort of fun is as popular as it is, we ought to boast very little about our improved humanity. No mad ass, it is true, is now baited for the gratification of gentility and fashion; no bull is now turned loose with fireworks, no dog is now roasted alive nor allowed to fight, no rats are killed, no badgers are drawn, and no game-cocks are allowed to spur each other to death. We have all agreed to turn our backs upon the amusements once popular at Hockley-in-the-Hole, and to cultivate the fine arts, which suffer us not to be brutal. A relish for imaginary sufferings, however, seems to have taken the place of the old coarse savagery, and this is gratified by comic representations of common diseases. Some day, perhaps, the wits who thus play with suffering will not linger idly at the half-way houses of death, but will push on their journey to its legitimate conclusion. If disease can be made funny, why not the last scene of all? Death is not always strutting in its diguified poses, and many men have left the world with something marvellously like an anti-climax. JOHN HOLLINGSHEAD, AUGUSTINE AND ADEODATUS. I HAVE elsewhere, in a short poem which bears | earliest infancy, was postponed till the boy could make a conscious profession of his faith, and when The youth of Augustine was, as is well-known, stained with evil. After the common custom of the time, baptism, instead of being administered in "Master and Scholar, &c. &c.," pp. 47-55. *Confess. i. 17. It was in Ibid. M. Bougaud, in the "Life of St. Monica," which Lady Herbert of Lea's translation has recently mitting to her husband's refusal to have the boy bapbrought before English readers, represents her as subtized when the danger of his illness was over. Augustine's language is however clear, and leaves no doubt that the statement in the text is true. Confess. ii. 7. in the comforting words of a holy bishop, who told her that the child of so many tears could not perish, in the promise of a voice which came to her in a dream, and bade her believe that where she was, her son should be also.* At the age of seventeen he came to Carthage, and plunged into all the vices of a great heathen city. For some months his life was simply one of boundless and random impurity, soon modified, but in no sense corrected by his adoption of the creed and worship of the Manichæans. Their use of Christian phrases, their hymns even to the glory of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, brought no light or strength to him. They hardly trained his intellect. They did not rouse his conscience.+ When the first intoxication of lust was over, there was a change which he himself recognizes as for the better, though it was only for the betterness of a less evil. At the age of seventeen, or eighteen, though unwilling to contract the responsibilities of a legal marriage, he found one whom he loved, and who loved him with a true affection. The vague license of his life was brought under control, and he continued faithful to her whom he had chosen. A son was born to them, not, as in lawful wedlock, the child of hopes and prayers, dreaded rather than desired, but when born "compelling him to love it."§ Even then he welcomed it as God's gift, and named it Adeodatus (God-given). For thirteen years the union continued unbroken; they went together to Rome and Milan. The boy, as he grew up, gave promise of high excellence, and was a new link between them. Augustine himself passed through the stages of his spiritual life, which he has traced with so wonderful a vividness. He left the fantastic worship and creed of the Manichæans, and the superstitions of diviners and astrologers. The study of Plato led him some steps towards the apprehension of a spiritual and eternal life. His work as a teacher, the purifying effect of daily contact, in the spirit of a father's tenderness, with the innocence of his own child, helped him yet further. He had come within reach of the teaching of Ambrose, He began to think seriously of settling down to some fixed form of faith, some reputable mode of life. His mother and his friends urged him to marry. With some want of wisdom, sacrificing what would have been his true happiness, and more in harmony with the Divine law of right, to the claims of society, and the world's standard of repute, instead of counselling him to wed the companion who had proved so faithful, and turn the mother of his son into a lawful wife, they fixed on a bride for him who was too young for marriage, and in the meantime insisted on his breaking off the connexion which he had formed at Carthage. It was, as he narrates, a hard trial to him. He parted from the woman who had for thirteen years shared his joys and labours and sorrows, with a “wounded and a bleeding heart." She returned to her own country, "vowing that thenceforth none should take his place." There is no trace that he ever saw or heard of her again. We may, perhaps, recog nize a certain tenderness and delicacy in his never mentioning her name; wherever she might be, the finger of scorn should not be pointed at her. He himself was less loyal in his affection, and sought to dissipate his sorrow in the caresses of another mistress. But the wound was not healed; his misery became greater, Happily his son was left to him; he could not bring himself to part with that treasure.* The time was close at hand which was to bring the answer to his mother's prayer, and the peace of God to his own troubled and wounded spirit. The decision, which no deliberation, no effort of will seemed able to bring about, came, he tells us, through a seeming chance, in which he recognised the hand of God. Agitated by the entreaties and persuasions of friends who pressed him to lose no time, struggling between the spirit and the flesh, restless and disquieted, he fled from all human companionship, threw himself under the branches of a fig-tree, and burst into a flood of tears. Broken utterances passed from his lips. "How long, 0 Lord, how long? To-morrow! to-morrow! Why not now? Why not end my shame and misery at once?" As he lay in this agony of soul, a voice, like that of boy or girl singing, floated to him through the air, "Take and read, take and read." He had never heard those words as the burden of any song, and it came to him as a message from God. He remembered how, in the history of St. Antony, which had recently been brought before his notice, the whole life of the man of God had been determined by the seemingly chance words that met him as he opened a MS. of the Gospels. He believed himself to be called to learn wisdom in the same way. He rose from the ground, and returning to the place where he had left his friend, took up the volume of the Epistles, which he had laid down in his agony of spirit, opened it, and read the words, "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof." until this repudiation took place, he could not even speak to the half-converted inquirer. This is, I believe, a pure invention. It is balanced by a deliberate suppression of the fact that Monica herself never felt so little certain of when she urged this respectable marriage against the Divine guidance, never was so haunted by misgivings, as bent of her son's affections; and that its immediate result was, not a victory over evil, but a relapse into a worse form of it. M. Bougaud trusts to his imagination again in the statement that it is "certain the object of Augustine's love retired to a convent to spend her time in penitence and prayer." It is, of course, possible; but neither Augustine, nor any one else who could know, says a word about it. * Confess. vi. 25. They came to him as with a new and marvellous power. The darkness passed away, and the flood of light, the light of God, poured in.* The story has been often told, and were it my purpose now to relate it in its relation to the life of Augustine as a whole, it ought to have been told more fully. I am concerned with it chiefly in its bearing upon the life of the son rather than on that of the father. For him too, it is hardly too much to say, it was the starting-point of a new blessedness. After an interval of preparation Augustine returned to Milan, and presented himself to Ambrose for baptism. With him came Alypius, the companion of his school-boy days, the friend of his riper years, who had shared, though with less of the throes and agonies of a strong soul, his inquiries after truth, and with him had been led to know it. But with those two friends of mature age there was also the boy Adeodatus, the darling of his father's heart, whom he now sought to bring under the power of the grace of God, and within the shelter of the eternal home in which he himself, after his many wanderings, had at last found refuge. He stood there "the child of sin," but God "had shewed mercy on him." When the father speaks of the memories of that day he dwells on this as its brightest joy. They, the father and son, were to begin their new life as children of God together. The boy was to be brought up now "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." This consecration of natural affections gave to them a "marvellous sweetness." He could not but weep for joy. Adeodatus seems, indeed, to have presented the pattern of a bright and stainless youth. His father speaks of him as possessing a wisdom far beyond his years. God, in his almighty love, had brought good out of evil, and though he had been in the fullest sense of the words, "conceived and bora in sin," had given him all good gifts of wisdom and knowledge. For this Augustine thanks God, even though the clearness and depth of that wisdom filled him with amazement and with awe. The work of educating him, always a delight, assumed now a new character. In a book which bears the title of The Teacher (De Magistro), he reproduces, in the form of a dialogue with his son, a long series of lessons on the use and the power of words, implying some knowledge of Greek and Punic as well as of their own language, Latin. He draws his illustrations (it is worth while to remember that this was after his conversion) from the Satires of Persius, and Adeodatus discusses it with him, and, as it were, caps his quotation. He leads his pupil on to the thought that all words derive their power, as means and instruments of truth, from the Divine Word who speaks to the soul of man, to the utterance of the vow that he will love that Divine Teacher ever more and more in proportion as he grows in know. ledge. And this, he himself testifies, is not an imaginary dialogue, as between any teacher and any pupil, but reproduces what had actually passed between them.* We may legitimately look on it as representing the "sweet converse which they habitually had together. It was one of the blessed fruits of Monica's holiness and love that the boy came under her influence also. She took in his affections the place of the mother he had lost; and loved him as she had loved his father, but without the fear and grief which that love had cost her. In a treatise On the Blessed Life, written while his son was yet living, and constructed upon the model of those dialogues of Plato which had been so helpful to him, he introduces Adeodatus as one of the interlocutors, "youngest of all in years, but unless I greatly err, with an intellect in which there is the promise of great things."+ Monica too was there, gaining the ear even of the students and teachers of philosophy by her earnest saintliness. Among other questions, they discuss the nature of the eternal life of blessedness. They agree that it can be found only in God. "He who has God is blessed." But then comes the question, Who can be said to have God? and they give different answers-"He who lives rightly:" "He who does what God commands."+ Adeodatus too has an answer ready, "He has God who has not an unclean spirit;" and Monica sees in this an instance of the truth that wisdom is brought out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. This, more than any other definition, went to the root of the whole matter. The presence of impurity in the heart was incompatible with that knowledge, that fruition of the Divine Presence in which eternal blessedness consists. But the father went on to probe the boy's thoughts still further: "What did he mean by those words of his? Who could be said not to have an unclean spirit?" The boy made answer, "He who lives in purity?" Questioned further, whether by that purity he meant only abstinence from gross sensual siu, he answered yet again in words which Augustine noted down at the time, "He alone lives in purity who waits on God in all things, and devotes himself solely to Him."§ The death of Monica not long afterwards, when her son was but thirty-two, and her grandson fifteen, filled both of them with a sorrow which till then neither of them had known. As one whose prayer had been answered and whose joy was completed, she was ready to depart in peace. It was enough that she had seen her son a Christian, not a Platonist, a Catholic, not a Manichæan. Augus |