he world, he detects the Divine
Presence, like a bright cloud overshadowing. O! then doubt melts away,
and wrong dwindles, and the jubilee of victorious falsehood is but a
peal of drunken laughter, and the spittings of guilt and contempt no
more than flakes of foam flung against a hero's breast-plate. Then one
sees, as it were, with the vision of God, who looked down upon the old
cycles, when a sweltering waste covered the face of the globe, and huge,
reptile natures held it in dominion;--who beholds the pulpy worm,
down in the sea, building the pillars of continents;--so one sees the
principalities of evil sliding from their thrones, and the deposits
of humble faithfulness rising from the deep of ages. Our sympathy, our
benevolent effort in the work of God and humanity, how much do they need
not only the vision of intellectual foresight, but of the faith which,
on bended knees, sees further than the telescope!

And alas! for him who, in his personal need and effort, has no margin of
holier inspiration--no rim of divine splendor---around his daily life!
Without the vision of life's great realities we cannot see what our work
is, or know how to do it.

But such visions must be necessarily rare and transient, or we shall
miss their genuine efficacy. We must work in comparative shadow, without
the immediate sight of these realities; and only in the place of our
rest,--rest for higher efforts and a new career,--only there may we have
their constant companionship, and build their perpetual tabernacles.

THE SHADOW OF DISAPPOINTMENT.

But we trusted that it had been he which should have
redeemed Israel. LUKE xxiv. 21.

In the accounts of the disciples, contained in the New Testament, there
is no attempt to glorify them, or to conceal any weakness. From the
first to the last, they think and act precisely as men would think and
act in their circumstances;--they are affected just as others of like
culture would be affected by such events as those set forth in the
record. And the genuineness of their conduct argues the genuineness of
the incidents which excited it. The divine, wonderworking, risen Jesus,
is the necessary counterpart of the amazed, believing, erring hoping,
desponding, rejoicing fishermen and publicans. This stamp of reality is
very evident in the instance before us. The conduct and the feelings of
the disciples are those of men who have been involved in a succession of
strange experience