tending, vitally necessary to human life, made by the bruising and
grinding of the grain, unostentatiously having no life or worth of its
own except as it is absorbed into the life of others and lives in them.
We wished in this history to speak of a class of lives formed on the
model of Christ, and like his, obscure and unpretending, like his,
seeming to end in darkness and defeat, but which yet have this
preciousness and value that the dear saints who live them come nearest
in their mission to the mission of Jesus. They are made, not for a
career and history of their own, but to be bread of life to others. In
every household or house have been some of these, and if we look on
their lives and deaths with the unbaptized eyes of nature, we shall see
only most mournful and unaccountable failure, when, if we could look
with the eye of faith, we should see that their living and dying has
been bread of life to those they left behind. Fairest of these, and
least developed, are the holy innocents who come into our households to
smile with the smile of angels, who sleep in our bosoms, and win us with
the softness of tender little hands, and pass away like the lamb that
was slain before they have ever learned the speech of mortals. Not vain
are even these silent lives of Christ's lambs, whom many an earth-bound
heart has been roused to follow when the Shepherd bore them to the
higher pastures. And so the daughter who died so early, whose
wedding-bells were never rung except in heaven,--the son who had no
career of ambition or a manly duty except among the angels,--the patient
sufferers, whose only lot on earth seemed to be to endure, whose life
bled away drop by drop in the shadows of the sick-room--all these are
among those whose life was like Christ's in that they were made, not for
themselves, but to become bread to us.

It is expedient for us that they go away. Like their Lord, they come to
suffer, and to die; they take part in his sacrifice; their life is
incomplete without their death, and not till they are gone away does the
Comforter fully come to us.

It is a beautiful legend which one sees often represented in the
churches of Europe, that when the grave of the mother of Jesus was
opened, it was found full of blossoming lilies,--fit emblem of the
thousand flowers of holy thought and purpose which spring up in our
hearts from the memory of our sainted dead.

Cannot many, who read these lines, bethink them of such rooms