mighty before there was any death or hell.
And Christ is the _last_, and will be loving and just and glorious and
almighty as ever, in that great day when all enemies shall be under His
feet, and death shall be destroyed, and death and hell shall be cast into
the lake of fire.

_MS. Sermon_. 1857.

A Living God. January 8.

Here and there, among rich and poor, there are those whose heart and
flesh, whose conscience and whose intellect, cry out for the _Living_
God, and will know no peace till they have found Him. For till then they
can find no explanation of the three great human questions--Where am I?
Whither am I going? What must I do?

_Sermons on the Pentateuch_. 1862.

The Fairy Gardens. January 9.

Of all the blessings which the study of Nature brings to the patient
observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this, that the
farther he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which
Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful
and yet comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One
greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with awe, amid
the pomp of Nature's ever-busy rest, hears as of old, The Word of the
"Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day."

_Glaucus_. 1855.

Love. January 10.

Oh! Love! Love! Love! the same in peasant and in peer! The more
honour to you, then, old Love, to _be_ the same thing in this world which
_is_ common to peasant and to peer. They say that you are blind, a
dreamer, an exaggerator--a liar, in short! They just know nothing about
you, then. You will not see people as they seem--as they have become, no
doubt; but why? Because you see them as they ought to be, and are in
some deep way eternally, in the sight of Him who conceived and created
them!

_Two Years Ago_, chap. xiv. 1856.

Life--Love. January 11.

We must live nobly to love nobly.

_MS._

The Seed of Good. January 12.

Never was the young Abbot heard to speak harshly of any human being.
"When thou hast tried in vain for seven years," he used to say, "to
convert a sinner, then only wilt thou have a right to suspect him of
being a worse man than thyself." That there is a seed of good in all
men, a divine word and spirit striving with all men, a gospel and good
news which would turn the hearts of all men, if abbots and priests could
but preach it aright, was