dards, no laws can help or
hinder them.

To them the world is as if it were not. Work and pain and loss are as if
they were not. These are they to whom it is easy to die any death, if good
can come that way to one they love. These are they who do die daily
unnoted on our right hand and on our left,--fathers and mothers for
children, husbands and wives for each other. These are they, also, who
live,--which is often far harder than it is to die,--long lives, into
whose being never enters one thought of self from the rising to the going
down of the sun. Year builds on year with unvarying steadfastness the
divine temple of their beauty and their sacrifice. They create, like God.
The universe which science sees, studies, and explains, is small, is
petty, beside the one which grows under their spiritual touch; for love
begets love. The waves of eternity itself ripple out in immortal circles
under the ceaseless dropping of their crystal deeds.

Angels desire to look, but cannot, into the mystery of holiness and beauty
which such human lives reveal. Only God can see them clearly. God is their
nearest of kin; for He is love.

Rainy Days.

With what subtle and assured tyranny they take possession of the world!
Stoutest hearts are made subject, plans of conquerors set aside,--the
heavens and the earth and man,--all alike at the mercy of the rain. Come
when they may, wait long as they will, give what warnings they can, rainy
days are always interruptions. No human being has planned for them then
and there. "If it had been but yesterday," "If it were only to-morrow," is
the cry from all lips. Ah! a lucky tyranny for us is theirs. Were the
clouds subject to mortal call or prohibition, the seasons would fail and
death get upper hand of all things before men agreed on an hour of common
convenience.

What tests they are of people's souls! Show me a dozen men and women in
the early morning of a rainy day, and I will tell by their words and their
faces who among them is rich and who is poor,--who has much goods laid up
for just such times of want, and who has been spend-thrift and foolish.
That curious, shrewd, underlying instinct, common to all ages, which takes
shape in proverbs recognized this long ago. Who knows when it was first
said of a man laying up money, "He lays by for a rainy day"? How close
the parallel is between the man who, having spent on each day's living the
whole of each day's income, finds himself helples