red with foul wrong.
So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,
One summer Sabbath day I strolled among
The green mounds of the village burial-place;
Where, pondering how all human love and hate
Find one sad level, and how, soon or late,
Wronged and wrong-doer, each with meekened face,
And cold hands folded over a still heart,
Pass the green threshold of our common grave,
Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart,
Awed for myself, and pitying my race,
Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave,
Swept all my pride away, and trembling
I forgave!"

Forgiveness,--forgiveness in love, and in readiness to aid and to
rejoice in all future success of the one who had erred,--is not this the
highest renunciation of the Christian life? Is it not this which is set
before us in the progress of spirituality? Mutual forgiveness, mutual
aid, mutual trust and sustaining, realizing that we all err and need to
be forgiven even as we need to forgive,--shall we not in these touch the
_blessedness_ of sacrifice rather than its barren husk, and find in it
that "soul of happiness" which should be the perpetual atmosphere of the
higher life? For "this is the life eternal--to know Thee, the only true
God," and humanity knows God just in proportion to the degree in which
it is able to partake of the Divine Spirit and translate its religious
aspiration into practical guidance for the affairs of the day.

Probably the one solution of the problem of life in all its intricacies
and its perplexing and baffling experiences lies in that trust in God
which is the soul's absolute surrender to the Divine will. Even in this
solution, however, perplexities not unfrequently lie, from the fact that
it is not always easy to separate that inevitableness which runs through
human affairs from the results that we, ourselves, produce by our own
series of choices and our habitual currents of thought. "A good will has
nothing to fear," says Pere De Caussade; "it can but fall under that
all-powerful hand which guides and sustains it in all its wanderings. It
is this divine Hand which draws it toward the goal when it has wandered
therefrom, which restores it to the path. The work of the divine action
is not in proportion to the capacity of a simple, holy soul, but to her
purity of intention; nor does it correspond to the means she adopts, the
projects she forms, the counsel she follows. The soul may err in all
these, and this