an a disappointment of hopes and
dreams? It is true, is it not? that the coming of the child brought
enrichment into the life of its parents? There was a new love born for
this one child which is not the common property of all the children of
the family, but is the peculiar possession of this child and its
parents. Life--the life of the parents--is better and nobler by virtue
of this love. They understand this, because when they stand by the side
of the child's coffin they never feel that it had been better that this
child had not come into existence. And more than that: as they commit
this fragile body to the grave they know that there is no real sense in
which they can say that they have lost this child. Rather, the child is
a perpetual treasure, for the moment contemplated through tears, but
presently to be thought of with unclouded joy. It is so wonderful a
thing to think of this pure soul caught back to God; to think of it
growing to spiritual maturity in God's very presence; to think of it
following the Lamb withersoever He goeth. Yes: to think of it also as
our child still, with our love in its heart, knowing that it has a
father and a mother on earth, and, that, just because of its early
death, it can be to them, what otherwise they would have been to it--the
guard and helper of their Jives. In God's presence are the souls of
children as perpetual intercessors for those whom they have left on
earth; and they may well rejoice before God in that what appeared the
tragedy of their death was in fact a recall from the field of battle
before the testing of their life was made. We wept as over an
irreparable loss,

While into nothingness crept back a host
Of shadows unexplored, of sins unsinned.

The artists have imagined the souls of those who first died for Jesus
attending Him on the way to Egypt as a celestial guard. In any case we
are certain that the angels who watched about Him so closely all His
life were with the Holy Family as they set out upon the way of exile. It
would have been a wearisome march but that Jesus was there. His presence
lightened all the toils of the desert way. Egypt, their place of refuge,
would not have seemed to them what it seems to us, a land of wonder, of
marvellous creations of human skill and intelligence, but a place of
banishment from all that was dear, from the ties of home and religion.
The religion which lay wrapped in the Holy Child was to break down
barriers and hin