oul, has furnished to her Mr Tryan, whose life is
based on the principle laid down by the one great Evangelist, "He that
loveth his soul shall lose it; he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto
life eternal." {15}

Mr Tryan, as first represented to us, is not an engaging figure. Narrow
and sectarian, full of many uncharities, to a great extent vain and self-
conscious, glad to be flattered and idolised by men and women by no means
of large calibre or lofty standard--it might well seem impossible to
invest such a figure with one heroic element. Yet it is before this man
we are constrained to bow down in reverence, as before one truer,
greater, nobler than ourselves; and as we stand with Janet Dempster
beside the closing grave, we may well feel that one is gone from among us
whose mere presence made it less hard to fight our battle against "the
world, the flesh, and the devil." The explanation of the paradox is not
far to seek. The principle which animated the life now withdrawn from
sight--which raised it above all its littlenesses and made it a witness
for God and His Christ, constraining even the scoffers to feel the
presence of "Him who is invisible"--this principle was self-sacrifice. So
at least the imperfections of human speech lead us to call that which
stands in antagonism to self-pleasing; but before Him to whom all things
are open, what we so call is the purification and exaltation of that self
in us which is the highest created reflex of His image--the growing up of
it into His likeness for ever.

We may here, once for all, and very briefly, advert to one specialty of
the author's works, which, if we are right in our interpretation of their
central moral import, flows almost necessarily as a corollary from it. In
each of these sketches one principal figure is blotted out just when our
regards are fixed most strongly on it. Milly, Tina, and Mr Tryan all
die, at what may well appear the crisis of life and destiny for
themselves or others. There is in this--if not in specific intention,
certainly in practical teaching--something deeper and more earnest than
any mere artistic trick of pathos--far more real than the weary
commonplace of suggesting to us any so-called immortality as the
completion and elucidation of earthly life; far profounder and simpler,
too, than the only less trite commonplace of hinting to us the mystery of
God's ways in what we call untimely death. The true import of it we take
to