necessary to ask. What! wouldst thou hesitate or be reluctant to restore to every one his own?' 'No,' she replied, 'but yet I thought it best not to restore them without acquainting thee therewith.' She then led him to the chamber, and, stepping to the bed, took the white covering from the dead bodies. 'Ah! my sons, my sons,' loudly lamented their father. 'My sons! the light of my eyes, and the light of my understanding: I was your father, but you were my teachers in the law.' The mother turned away and wept bitterly. At length she took her husband by the hand and said, 'Rabbi, didst thou not teach me that we must not be reluctant to restore that which was intrusted to our keeping? See; the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, and blessed be the name of the Lord.' 'Blessed be the name of the Lord,' echoed the Rabbi, 'and blessed be his holy name for ever.""

We should esteem it a mark of honor and peculiar regard, if the king should choose one of our children to be taken into his family, and trained for the throne. There are thousands of little children besides ours, whom God might have taken, if he had been pleased; but he loved ours so much, and loved us so

much, that he came into our humble household, and gently bore away from our arms our infant child, and took him into his own family, and placed him among the brightest and best, and made him a king. There is love in that-precious love-a Father's love.

There is love in thus chastising us when we wander, and He would draw us back. I have seen a shepherd striving to drive his flock into the fold, while they would refuse to enter, and prefer to run off into the highways, where they were in danger of being torn and lost. At length, when wearied with efforts to urge them in, he takes a lamb into his arms, and folds it gently in his bosom, and walks into the inclosure, while the mother follows, and the whole flock come on, and are soon folded in the place of safety and peace. So have I seen a family whom God would win to his house and home in heaven; but they became worldly-minded, and wandered away among the dangerous paths of a deceitful, unsatisfying earth; and when his calls and commands had been lost upon them, he has taken their lamb, their pet lamb, their youngest child, and laid it in his own bosom; and then, O then, how readily the mother and all the little flock have followed him to the gate

of the celestial city, into which he has entered with their darling in his arms!

It was love, infinite love, that ordered such a plan; and it will be felt the more, the more the heart is softened, and the eyes are opened to behold the hand that does it.

"Before I was afflicted, I went astray." "It is good for me that I have been afflicted." So David was able to say while yet in the house of his pilgrimage; and so shall we say, if not now, when we come to sit down by the river of the water of life, our children with us, broken households reunited, and talk over the trials of the way by which we have been led, and admire and adore the grace that directed the blow that laid our early hopes in ruins, blasted our fond domestic joys, buried our babes, and broke our hearts.

CHAPTER VI.

The Child is happier now.

WE desire our children's happiness; we pray and labor for it; we are willing to make great sacrifices of our comfort to secure it for them. In sickness, we forget our own health and lives for the sake of theirs. watch them, and toil for them, and would die for them. We more than die for them sometimes.

We

And if we grieve when their happiness calls them from us, our grief is selfish; it is for ourselves, and not for them, we mourn. But we should not mourn, if we knew what he has gained whom we have lost. Instantly on being released from the body, the spirit of the infant returns to God who gave it. Endowed with capacities that, if permitted to expand and improve on earth, would in fifty years, perhaps, have made him wiser than Newton, or Plato, or Solomon, it rushes into the mysteries of the divine Mind, and, on wings of thought such as angels use in rising into the regions of knowledge that pass all under

standing, he begins his flight, and stretches onward and right onward for ever. He never tires. No weakness, no sickness, no pain, to make him pause or falter in his upward way. He bears himself into the presence of the Omniscient, becomes a disciple in the school of Christ, flies on with Moses, and David, and John, and learns from them the wonderful things of heaven, the mysteries of the kingdom; and thus, ever advancing, he rises nearer and still nearer to the comprehension of Him who is still infinitely above and beyond his last and loftiest reach. And what a change is this! Yesterday, an infant in his mother's arms, or a child amused with a rattle or a straw; to-day, a seraph in the midst of seraphim, burning with excessive glory in the presence of God.

Happiness is the fruit of holiness. Washed in the blood of the everlasting covenant, and sanctified by the Holy Ghost, he is now among the holy, as happy as any who are there. Those faculties of mind, expanded in the atmosphere of heaven, are employed in the praise of that grace that called him so soon from Nature's darkness into the glorious light of eternity; the gloom of sin scarce shading the brightness of his rising sun, before the