strengthened by the true sympathy of souls.

Love is the tyranny
So blessed to endure!
Who mourns the loss of liberty,
With all things else secure?

Live on, sweet tyranny!
(Cries heart within a heart)
God's blossom of Eternity,
How beautiful thou art!

* * * * *

XVII.

JOHN PLOUGHMAN.

WHAT HE SAYS OF RELIGIOUS GRUMBLERS--GOOD-NATURE AND
FIRMNESS--PATIENCE--OPPORTUNITIES--FAULTS--HOME--MEN WHO ARE
DOWN--HOPE--HINTS AS TO THRIVING, ETC.

John Ploughman's Talk, says the author, Rev. C.H. Spurgeon, the famous
London preacher, "has not only obtained an immense circulation, but it
has exercised an influence for good." As to the "influence for good,"
the reader will judge when he has read the following choice bits from
the pages of that unique book. And we feel sure that he will thank us
for including John among our "Brave Men and Women."

RELIGIOUS GRUMBLERS.

When a man has a particularly empty head, he generally sets up for a
great judge, especially in religion. None so wise as the man who knows
nothing. His ignorance is the mother of his impudence and the nurse of
his obstinacy; and, though he does not know B from a bull's foot, he
settles matters as if all wisdom were in his fingers' ends--the pope
himself is not more infallible. Hear him talk after he has been at
meeting and heard a sermon, and you will know how to pull a good man to
pieces, if you never knew it before. He sees faults where there are
none, and, if there be a few things amiss, he makes every mouse into an
elephant. Although you might put all his wit into an egg-shell, he
weighs the sermon in the balances of his conceit, with all the airs of a
bred-and-born Solomon, and if it be up to his standard, he lays on his
praise with a trowel; but, if it be not to his taste, he growls and
barks and snaps at it like a dog at a hedgehog. Wise men in this world
are like trees in a hedge, there is only here and there one; and when
these rare men talk together upon a discourse, it is good for the ears
to hear them; but the bragging wiseacres I am speaking of are vainly
puffed up by their fleshly minds, and their quibbling is as senseless as
the cackle of geese on a common. Nothing comes out of a sack but what
was in it, and, as their bag is empty, they shake nothing but wind out
of it. It is very likely that neither ministers nor their sermons are
perfect--the best