s were given very plain.

"No room for mirth or trifling here,
For worldly hope, or worldly fear,
If life so soon is gone;
If now the Judge is at the door,
And all mankind must stand before
Th' inexorable throne!

"No matter which my thoughts employ,
A moment's misery or joy;
But O! when both shall end,
Where shall I find my destined place?
Shall I my everlasting days
With fiends or angels spend?"

Eleanor sat cowering before that thought. "Now are we going to have a
terrible sermon?" was her inward question. She would not look up. The
preliminary services were all over, she found, and the preacher rose
and gave out his text.

"A glorious high throne from the beginning, is the place of our
sanctuary."

Eleanor could not keep her eyes lowered another second. The well-known
deliberate utterance, and a little unconscious indefinable ring of the
tones in which the words were spoken, brought her eyes to the speaker's
face; and they were never turned away again. "Do we need a
sanctuary?"--was the first question the preacher started; and very
quietly he went on to discuss that. Very quietly; his manner and his
voice were neither in the slightest degree excited; how it was, Eleanor
did not know, that as he went on a tide of feeling swept over the
assembly. She could see it in the evidences of tears, and she heard it
in a deep sough of the breath that went all over the house. The
preacher was reaching each one's secret consciousness, and stirring
into life that deep hidden want of every heart which every heart knew
differently. Some from sorrow; some from sin; some from weariness; some
from loneliness; some from the battle of life; some from the struggle
with their own hearts; all, from the wrath to come. Nay, Eleanor's own
heart was throbbing with the sense that he had reached it and touched
it, and knew its condition. How was it, that with those quiet words he
had bowed every spirit before him, her own among the number? It is
true, that in the very containedness of his tones and words there was
an evidence of suppressed power; it flashed out once in a while; and
wrought possibly with the more effect from the feeling that it was
contained and kept down. However it were, the minds of the assembly
were already at a high state of tension, when he passed to the other
part of his subject--the consideration of the sanctuary. It was no
discourse of regular heads and divisions; it is impossible to