others, who also pronounce boldly on the affairs of the public, and determine the justice or madness, the wisdom or folly, of national administrations, of peace and war, &c., whom neither God nor men ever qualified for such a post of judgment ! 9. They were not capable of entering into the numerous concurring springs of action; nor had they ever taken a survey of the twentieth part of the circumstances, which were necessary for such judgments or censures. LESSON CVI. The Contrast. 1. ONE cold December evening, as the stage whirled through the village of it stopped at the door of a humble cottage, and set down a single traveller. It was the abode of a poor widow, whose heart beat quick within her when the joyous sound of the sleigh bells ceased so unexpectedly at her own door. She well knew the unlooked-for visiter could be none other than her only son; and trembling with joy, surprise, and eagerness, she h hurried to meet him. 2. But ere her hand touched the latch, a fearful sound struck upon her ear. In a short, hollow cough, which the poor invalid in vain sought to stifle, she too well knew the symptom of that complaint which had made her a widow, and but for this one, a childless woman; and now she felt that she was to be wholly bereaved. It was a sad meeting. 3. Walter had left her when the blooming cheek and bright eye of his boyhood bade her hope that in the constitution of her youngest and gentlest, the seeds of untimely decay had not been sown before his birth; for five long years of apprenticeship in the distant city, had he nursed her hopes into certainty by constant and cheering letters; and now, when in her fond imagination she had pictured him to herself, ripened into glowing and hardy manhood, he suddenly stood before her, a tall, pale, slender, death-smitten stripling, the very image of her eldest born, as he looked but one short month before she followed him to his early grave. "I have come home, mother, for you to cure me," said the youth. She could not answer. 4. With an aching heart, the mother that night made ready the bed, in which five of those she best loved on earth had died; and laid upon it her softest pillows for the emaciated temples of her last; and when she heard him assure her that his complaint was a slow fever, and that city air had not agreed with him of late, and he should soon be well, now he was at home, and had her to nurse him, the heart of the poor widow sank within her, and there was a choking in her throat, that almost stifled the few words she tried to utter. 5. It was hard that night to pray; but she did pray, until her spirit waxed warm within her, and she felt stronger to bear the heavy burden which was now laid upon her so suddenly. Long before midnight she turned the pillow which she had drenched with tears, and laying her head upon it in holy confidence that all was for the best, she sank into the peaceful sleep of innocence. 6. After this came the well-known cares, and anxieties, and fears, and comforts. It was not long ere the sufferer himself knew that he had only come home to have his last hours soothed as none but a mother can soothe them; and to repose in the churchyard, where he had wandered among the graves in his childhood: From that hour the mother and the son talked little of earth and earthly things, when alone together, except at those transient intervals, when, cheated for an instant by the deceitful nature of his complaint, life again rose, gleaming in fairy colors, before the eye of the youthful sufferer, and seemed for a moment nearer, brighter, and more substantial, than the blessed regions beyond the grave. 7. Short, however, were these intervals; and even in them the more experienced eye of the mother read too well all that might once have deceived her: at such times, she found it needful to pray alone. She did not ask that the cup might pass from her, that her son might be spared to her; she had done that when she was young in sorrow, and had not been sufficiently chastised. 8. But now she felt assured that he was to die, and that it was best he should die; she only prayed that he might be fitted for that pure and happy world, into which he was mercifully taken so young, and that she might be comforted from above, through her present trial, and through the loneliness of her old age. Both prayers were reasonable, and they were not rejected. The very act of praying for resignation soothes us into that blessed state of mind for which we pray. 9. During the sickness of her son, the cares of the widow were many; but so too were her comforts. She toiled for Those who knew how very him, but she prayed with him. near he was to her, and that he was her all upon earth, would scarcely have believed that she could have known a happy hour while he lay before her eyes, dying by inches; yet there were many times, when, as she listened to the pure and holy sentiments of a dying Christian, and looked on his cheek, flushed not more with the fire that revelled in his veins than with hope, and beheld the saintly expression of his eyes, humbly but fervently raised towards heaven, she felt that it was joy thus to contemplate even the last of her children. She regarded him, not as a being of earth, but as one about to ascend almost visibly to his proper home, a region of perfect purity and happiness. How could she weep while such ideas crowded on her mind! 10. In the same village, and separated only by a small orchard from the cottage of the pious widow, lived one on whom the sun of worldly prosperity shone brightly. Seated amidst the rural abundance of a large and thriving farm, surrounded by a family of healthy children, and almost a stranger to sorrow from her birth, the neighbor of our widow was a woman who performed all her worldly duties without reproach, looked upon the peace and plenty that surrounded her as a matter of course, and rose up in the morning, and lay down in the evening, without one aspiration of heartfelt prayer of gratitude to Him whom she never denied, but seldom thought of as the author of her happiness. 11. Twice only had the even shadow of grief fallen upon her dwelling during a long life; once when the husband whom she had wedded with indifference in her youth was taken from her, after ten years of union had warmed her heart into something like conjugal love; and once when her eldest and favorite child, after a boyhood of dangerous idleness and mischievous pranks, eloped from her and went to From that time she had never heard from him: months and years rolled on, filled up with a round of petty duties, cares, and joys; and she had imperceptibly learned to think of him as one whose face she should behold no more. sea. 12. But scarcely a fortnight after the gentle and pious Walter returned to die under the eye of his mother, George Nelson came home, to the long forsaken abode of his childhood. Proud and happy, indeed, was the mother, as she gazed on the handsome and hardy sailor, and beheld him loaded, as she thought, with the fruits of successful toil; proud and happy, but not grateful! 13. The frequent oath, indeed, sounded strangely and harshly on her ear, and sometimes, during the jollity of his unguarded moments, she heard tales to which she wished she had not listened. But her doubts and her scruples sprung from no deep source; and though she feared all was not right, her very soul did not shudder within her in that horror of depravity natural to those whose affections are given to a God of purity; and her doubts did not prey upon her spirit. She remembered that such were the ways of sailors; she palliated the sin of the man in her own mind, as she had done the follies of the boy, and for three days exulted and was happy. 14. The bold, yet restless eye of the youth, certain inconsistencies in the account he gave of himself during his long absence, and the utter want of principle betrayed in his conversation, won him no regard among his neighbors; particularly among those who remembered against him the misdemeanors and general recklessness of his boyhood. Yet the eye of a mother closed itself against all that might shock her partiality; till, on the evening of the third day, an awful light broke upon her; and she awoke in horror from her dream. 15. The family had gathered round the blazing fire that had sent roaring volumes up the chimney, illuminating with its red and dancing beams the whole apartment, from the young children that nestled in the corner close by the blaze, to the dark cloaks and garments that hung round the walls; the room rung with the sound of merriment, and the young sailor was heard louder than all, singing songs, fitter, indeed, for the forecastle, where he had learned them, than for the domestic fireside. 16. As the mother moved to and fro in the apartment, her eye fell carelessly sometimes through a window on the beautiful winter evening landscape that lay without, the fields wrapped in one wide sheet of spotless snow, and reposing under the moonlight and starlight of a cloudless sky, calm and lovely as the remains of departed innocence and beauty. 17. But hers was not a soul to be moved with such a scene; and it had not power to arrest her eye one moment, till a face, the face of a man, appeared, looking in at the window. Then she stopped, and another, and another presented itself, apparently surveying the group around the fireside. There was a moment's consultation, and they all disappeared; but ere the widow, surprised and appalled, she scarce knew why, had opened her panic-struck lips, there was a trampling of feet in the snow without, the door was burst open, and three men rushed into the room. At the first glimpse of their countenances, George sprang from his seat with an oath, and, after a wild glance round the room in search of other means of escape, made a desperate attempt to force his way past them. 18. The struggle was violent and short, and presently, bound, panting, and helpless, he stood unresistingly among them. Then the shrieks of his mother fell on his ear, his head sunk on his breast, his knees shook under him, and his little brothers and sisters, who looked that night on his ghastly and sullen countenance, never forgot it till their dying day. The words "bloody pirate and murderer" that the mother heard; the bound arms and guilty brow of the son were all that she saw; and a flood of grief, horror, and, to her worst of all, worldly shame, rushed upon her soul. were all 19. Long before midnight, the unhappy criminal was on his way to the scene of trial, conviction, ignominious and untimely death; leaving behind him a home filled with shrieks and agony. His crime was indeed a crime of blood; a murder committed, with the aid of two accomplices, on the wide and lonely ocean, where the death-cry of the wretched victim could reach no human ear, and his horrid struggles, as they threw him into the sea, mangled and yet living, were vain as the hope of human succor. The particulars of the tale never reached the ear of his mother; but in the hopeless, alas! almost prayerless misery of that night, she felt what it was to have lived" without God in the world," and so to have brought up her eldest born. 20. That same night, the pure spirit of Walter Temple ascended to the God who gave it. His mother was alone in the room with him when he woke from a quiet sleep; and, pressing her shrivelled hands in his own cold and emaciated fingers, he whispered a request that she would read him one more chapter in the Bible. She took it up, but, as she looked on his face, she saw there the impress of death. She put the book into his hand, and eagerly drawing forward |