, we have lived the life of the senses, and obeyed the dictates
of our passions so long as they could satisfy us, and now we turn to God
because we find that he only can avail us! We seek religion for the good
it can do us, not for the service we can render God. We lay hold of it
selfishly, as something instituted merely for our help, and lavish our
demands upon it for consolation, turning away sullen and skeptical,
it may be, if these demands are not immediately answered. Many come
to religion for consolation who never apply to it for instruction,
for sanctification, for obedience. Let us learn that we can claim its
privileges only by performing its duties. We can see with the eye of its
clear, consoling faith, only when it has spiritualized our entire being,
and been developed in our daily conduct. Affliction may open religious
ideas in the soul, but only by the soul's discipline will those ideas
expand until they become our most intimate life, and we habitually enjoy
celestial companionship, and that supersensual vision of faith by which
we learn our relations to the departed.

That faith let us receive and cherish. If we live it we shall believe
it. No sophistry can steal it from us, no calamity make us surrender it.
But the keener the trial the closer will be our confidence. Standing
by the open sepulchre in which we see our friends, "not dead, but
sleeping," we shall say to insidious skepticism and gloomy doubt, in the
earnest words of the poet,

"O! steal not thou my faith away,
Nor tempt to doubt a lowly mind.
Make all that earth can yield thy prey,
But leave this heavenly gift behind.
Our hope is but the seaboy's dream,
When loud winds rise in wrath and gloom;
Our life, a faint and fitful beam,
That lights us to the cold, dark tomb;

Yet, since, as one from heaven has said,
There lies beyond that dreary bourn
A region where the faithful dead
Eternally forget to mourn,
Welcome the scoff, the sword, the chain,
The burning waste, the black abyss:--
I shrink not from the path of pain,
Which leads me to that world of bliss.

Then hush, thou troubled heart! be still;--
Renounce thy vain philosophy;--
Seek thou to work thy Maker's will,
And light from heaven shall break on thee.
'Twill glad thee in the weary strife,
Where strong men sink with falling breath