is only earthly wisdom is to accept the
united testimony of the men who have sought these things in the way
they were commanded. Of whom no single one has ever said that his
obedience or his faith had been vain, or found himself cast out
from the choir of the living souls, whether here, or departed, for
whom the song was written:--

God be merciful unto us, and bless us, and cause His face to shine
upon us;
That Thy way may be known upon earth, Thy saving health among all
nations.

Oh let the nations rejoice and sing for joy, for Thou shalt judge
the people righteously and govern the nations upon earth.
_Then_ shall the earth yield her increase, and God, even our own God,
shall bless us.
God shall bless us, and all the ends of the earth shall fear Him.

[Footnote A: With all who died in Faith, not having received the
Promises, nor--according to your modern teachers--ever to receive.]

[Footnote B: Hence to the end the text is that read in termination
of the lecture on its second delivery, only with an added word or
two of comment on Proverbs xvii.]

[Footnote C: 'The Conservation of Energy.' King and Co., 1873.]

[Footnote D: Written under the impression that the lurid and
prolonged sunsets of last autumn had been proved to be connected
with the flight of volcanic ashes. This has been since, I hear,
disproved again. Whatever their cause, those sunsets were, in the
sense in which I myself use the word, altogether 'unnatural' and
terrific: but they have no connection with the far more fearful,
because protracted and increasing, power of the Plague-wind. The
letter from White's 'History of Selborne,' quoted by the Rev. W. R.
Andrews in his letter to the 'Times,' (dated January 8th) seems to
describe aspects of the sky like these of 1883, just a hundred
years before, in 1783: and also some of the circumstances noted,
especially the variation of the wind to all quarters without
alteration in the air, correspond with the character of the
plague-wind; but the fog of 1783 made the sun dark, with
iron-colored rays--not pale, with blanching rays. I subjoin Mr.
Andrews' letter, extremely valuable in its collation of the records
of simultaneous volcanic phenomena; praying the reader also to
observe the instantaneous acknowledgment, by the true 'Naturalist,'
of horror in the violation of beneficent natural law.

"THE RECENT SUNSETS AND VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS.

"SIR,--It may