tal nor filial love were more than the names
of nonentities--Father, Son, Daughter, Child, but empty syllables, which
philosophy heeded not--or rather loved them in their emptiness, but
despised, hated, or feared them, when for a moment they seemed pregnant
with a meaning from heaven, and each in its holy utterance signifying
God!

No great moral or religious lesson can well be drawn, or say rather so
well, from such anomalous deathbeds, as from those of common
unbelievers. To show, in all its divine power, the blessedness of the
Christian's faith, it must be compared, rather than contrasted, with the
faith of the best and wisest of Deists. The ascendancy of the heavenly
over the earthly will then be apparent--as apparent as the superior
lustre of a star to that of a lighted-up window in the night. For above
all other things in which the Christian is happier than the Deist--with
the latter, the life beyond the grave is but a dark hope--to the former,
"immortality has been brought to light by the Gospel." That difference
embraces the whole spirit. It may be less felt--less seen when life is
quick and strong; for this earth alone has much and many things to
embrace and enchain our being--but in death the difference is as between
night and day.

* * * * *

NOTE.--In the later editions of "The Omnipresence of the Deity," the
passage animadverted on in the preceding chapter has been altered as
follows:--

"Lo! there, in yonder spectre-haunted room,
What sightless demons horrified the gloom,
When pale and shivering, and bedew'd with fear,
The dying Sceptic felt his hour draw near!
Ere the last throes with anguish lined his cheek,
He yell'd for mercy with a hollow shriek,
Mutter'd some accents of unmeaning prayer,
Lock'd his white lips--let God the rest declare.
Go, child of Darkness! see a Christian die;
No horror pales his lip, or dims his eye;
No fiend-shaped phantoms of destruction start
The hope Religion pillows on his heart,
When with a falt'ring hand he waves adieu
To hearts as tender as their tears are true;
Meek as an infant to the mother's breast
Turns, fondly longing for its wonted rest,
So to our God the yielding soul retires,
And in one sigh of sainted peace expires."

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

FIRST CANTICLE.

The present Age, which, after all, is a very pretty and pleasant one, is
feeli