s the life of even many a rich
man. All things are full of labour in England. Man cannot utter it, the
eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing; we are the
wisest of all nations; and yet as Solomon says, behold in much wisdom is
much grief; and in increasing knowledge, we still increase sorrow.

Truly, I may say of us Englishmen, as Paul said of the Christians of his
time, that if Christ be not raised from the dead, and if in this life
_only_ we have hope in Him, we are of all nations one of the most
unhappy. When we look at all the hundreds of thousands pent up in our
great cities among filth and smoke, toiling in factories, in workshops,
in dark mines under ground--when we think of the soldier on the march
under the sultry sun of India, the sailor on the stormy sea--when we
think of this our bleak inclement climate, our five months of winter
every year;--no man's food and clothing to be gained but by bitter toil,
either of himself or of others--and then when we compare our lot with
that of the dwellers in hot countries, in India and in Africa, and the
islands of the South Seas, where men live with no care, no labour--where
clothes and fire are never needed--where every tree bears delicious food,
and man lives in perpetual summer, in careless health and beauty, among
continual mirth and ease, like the birds which know no care--then it
seems at moments as if God had been unfair in giving so much more to the
savage than He has to us, of the blessings of this earthly life; and we
are led to long that our lot was cast in those fruitful and delicious
climates of the South, in a continual paradise of mirth and plenty, and
beauty and sunshine.

But no, my friends, we are more blest than the careless Indian who never
knows what labour is; his life is but the life of the butterfly, which
flutters from flower to flower and sports in the sunshine, and sucks
sweets for a brief hour, and then perishes without hope. His life is a
dream, he sees no heaven before him, he knows no glorious God, with the
sight of whom he is to be blest for ever. His body may be in perpetual
ease, and health, and beauty for a few short years, but what care has he
for his undying spirit, that is blind and dead within him?

But to bring a man's soul to life, to train and educate a man's soul that
it may go on from strength to strength, and glory to glory till it
appears in the presence of God--that wants a stern and a severe trainin