the gentle face is white and cold: the good brave heart has ceased to beat: all is cold to the voice of our affection, unmoved by our hot tears: all the light of the soul quenched within: gone, if there be no resurrection to a life of love eternal, gone to a dreary land where all things are forgotten: all that was good in him, all that was great in him, perished for ever. "But thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ, He is risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept." Ah yes, with those words on our lips we can say to the most broken-hearted mother weeping over her dead first-born, "Strive to be happy, because he is happy." "How changed, dear friend, are thy path and thy child's! He bends above thy cradle now, or holds His warning finger out to be thy guide; Which are to him the common sights of every day; He smiles to see thy wondering glances con The grass and pebbles of the spirit-world, Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace." One other lesson the picture seems to me to teach. The mystic River of the Water of Life flowing on invisible beneath the steps of the Holy Family symbolises, I take it, the reality of that spiritual kingdom of God that underlies all our daily life. How many a pilgrimage would be brighter if, by us and our dark waters, were known to flow the river which makes glad the City of God! How inspiring, how enthusiastic, how hopeful would this life be, if within it and about it we had not, so many of us, lost the power to see the movement of another world. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!" our Master said. Did it ever strike you to think that sight-the noblest of our earthly senses-is made the pattern and type of the highest altitude of the soul hereafter? The beatific vision is perfected sight. "All partial beauty is a pledge Of beauty in its plentitude." We are not to But for that vision we must wait. rest satisfied with dreams of it on earth. "Heaven is to be won, not dreamed." The beatific vision of the saints cannot be on earth an abiding contemplation. As soon as we say, "Lord, it is good for us to be here; let us make tabernacles!" down comes the cloud and blots out the glory, and we find, with the Disciples of old, that there is hard work to do at the foot of the Mountain of Transfiguration. Well, let us accept the lesson. The vision was there, but it was there for the sake of the work. Let us consecrate our work, whatever it be, to some noble service. Christ will accept our gift however small it may be. "Small service is true service while it lasts." Some home duty, perhaps, already yours, but never yet taken and offered to the King; some chance help to a friend that opportunity throws in your way, some service of selfdenial, some irksome duty, some hard thing to be done easily with a smile on the face for Christ's sake. Is there not something? Oh yes, offer Him that. He will take it, and your empty hands shall grow bright with mystic wreaths of roses, bringing gladness and fragrance to all around you. Out from the little spot of true service to Him in your life the influence will spread. Dedicate your life to Him, the little things and the great things, the secular and the spiritual, and the entire self will be quickened, revisited, illumined, as about your path, among the daily commonplaces of existence, you begin to feel the unearthly spell of the immortal beauty of the River of Eternal Life. A MAY FESTIVAL OF CHURCH AND LABOUR. I "Philip answered Jesus, 'Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that everyone may take a little.' Jesus said, 'Make the people sit down.'”—JOHN vi. 7, 10. “If a brother or sister be naked and in lack of daily food, and one of you say unto them, ‘Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled,' and yet ye give them not the things needful to the body, what doth it profit?"—JAMES ii. 15. I HAVE taken these words as my text because they are words of St. Philip and of St. James, and to-day is called by our Church St. Philip and St. James' Day. But it is not only because these words are appropriate to the Church Festival that I have chosen them, but because they also seem to me to suggest lessons which are appropriate to two other festivals-one quite ancient and almost obsolete, one quite modern, not to say novelwhich fall on this day. For to-day, as you know, is May Day, that Festival of an older civilisation, which only lingers Preached in Bristol Cathedral, at Evensong, May Day, 1894. on now in out-of-the-way country villages in the ceremonies of the May garlands of the children still carried, as I happen to know in many Buckinghamshire parishes, with song and dance from farm to farm, or in such gaily decked civic processions as that of the Carter's Carnival which is organised with so much elaboration on this Day in my own city of Liverpool-both of them survivals in culture, no doubt, from the old Roman Floralia, or Flower Festival in honour of the Goddess of the Spring. And to-day is also a Festival which is being increasingly kept by the workmen classes throughout the world as an International Holiday of Labour-Labour Day, as it is becoming the fashion to call it. Now the concurrence of Labour Day with a Pagan Holiday on the one hand, and with a Christian Festival on the other, is suggestive, surely, of thought. It is, I think, one of those "signs of the times" which every disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ is bound to "discern." For, to my mind at least, it seems to suggest this momentous question -Will the future history and genius of English Labour be Pagan or Christian? What is to be the religious future of English Democracy? Now, the answer to that question depends partly, no doubt, on the attitude of the Industrial Classes towards Religion, but it depends still more, I venture to think, on the attitude of the Christian Church towards Labour problems. At any rate, that is the aspect in which I ask you to consider the subject for |