ost
themselves, there has a dulness, a dreamy absence of mind, a fixed
sadness, come over them that wholly changes them. Though they sit and
converse with you, their true thoughts seem far away. They are kind and
courteous as ever, to the common eye, but I can see that all the relish
of life and of intercourse is now to them gone. All is flat and insipid.
The friend is coldly saluted; the meal left untasted, or partaken in
silence and soon abandoned; the affairs of the household left to others,
to any who will take charge of them. They tell me that this will always
be so; that however they may seem to others, they must ever experience a
sense of loss; not any less than they would if a limb had been shorn
away. A part of themselves, and of the life of every day and hour, is
taken from them.

How strange is all this, even in the light of Christian faith! How
inexplicable, we are ready to say, by any reason of ours, the providence
of God in taking away the human being in the first blossoming; before
the fruit has even shown itself, much less ripened! Yet is not
immortality, the hope, the assurance of immortality, a sufficient
solution? To me it is. This will not indeed cure our sorrows--they
spring from somewhat wholly independent of futurity, of either the hope,
or despair of it,--but it vindicates the ways of the Omnipotent, and
justifies them to our reason and our affections. Will Marcus and Lucilia
ever rejoice in the consolations which flow from this hope? Alas! I fear
not. They seem in a manner to be incapable of belief.

In the morning I shall start for Rome. As soon as there, you shall hear
from me again. Farewell.

* * * * *

While Piso was absent from Rome on this visit to his friend, it was my
fortune to be several times in the city upon necessary affairs of the
illustrious Queen, when I was both at the palace of Aurelian and that of
Piso. It was at one of these later visits, that it became apparent to
me, that the Emperor seriously meditated the imposing of restrictions of
some kind upon the Christians; yet no such purpose was generally
apprehended by that sect itself, nor by the people at large. The dark
and disastrous occurrences on the day of the dedication, were variously
interpreted by the people; some believing them to point at the
Christians, some at the meditated expedition of the Emperor, some at
Aurelian himself. The popular mind was, however, greatly inflamed
again