ct
of morality to determine the judgment, _while at the same time
it remained personal, and liable to love_. The written word and
established church prevented a degeneration into ungoverned
mysticism, but the predominant principle of vital religion
always remained that of self-sacrifice to the Saviour. Not only
the higher divisions of moral duties, but the simple, primary
impulses of benevolence, were subordinated to this new absorbing
passion. The world was loved 'in Christ alone.' The brethren
were members of his mystical body. All the other bonds that had
fastened down the spirit of the universe to our narrow round of
earth were as nothing in comparison to this golden chain of
suffering and self-sacrifice, which at once riveted the heart of
man to one who, like himself, was acquainted with grief. _Pain
is the deepest thing we have_ in our nature, and union through
pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any
other."[43]

[43] This is the passage referred to in Henry Taylor's delightful
_Notes from Life_ ("Essay on Wisdom"):--

"Fear, indeed, is the mother of foresight: spiritual fear,
of a foresight that reaches beyond the grave; temporal fear,
of a foresight that falls short; but without fear there is
neither the one foresight nor the other; and as pain has
been truly said to be 'the deepest thing in our nature,' so
is it fear that will bring the depths of our nature within
our knowledge. A great capacity of _suffering_ belongs to
genius; and it has been observed that an alternation of
joyfulness and dejection is quite as characteristic of the
man of genius as intensity in either kind." In his _Notes
from Books_, p. 216, he recurs to it:--"'Pain,' says a
writer whose early death will not prevent his being long
remembered, 'pain is the deepest thing that we have in our
nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real
and more holy than any other.'"

There is a sad pleasure,--_non ingrata amaritudo_, and a sort of
meditative tenderness, in contemplating the little life of this "dear
youth," and in letting the mind rest upon these his earnest thoughts; to
watch his keen and fearless, but child-like spirit, moving itself
aright--going straight onward "along the lines of limitless
des