d ye gave Me no
meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink; I was a stranger, and
ye took Me not in; naked, and ye clothed Me not; sick, and in prison,
and ye visited Me not."

These dread words are not for those who have cared as our Sovereign
Lady and her beloved ones have cared for the sick and the suffering
and the sad; who have bound up the heart-wounds of the widow and the
orphan and ministered to their earthly needs; who, like our lost
Princess Alice and her royal elder sister, have tended the victims of
war, shrinking from no ghastliness or repulsiveness, no horrors of
the hospital where victor and vanquished lay moaning in common
misery; or, like their queenly mother, have shed the sunshine of
royal smiles and soothing words and helpful alms upon the obscurer
but hardly less pitiable patients who crowd our English infirmaries.
In her northern and southern "homes" of Osborne and Balmoral the
Queen, too, has been able to share a true, unsophisticated friendship
with her humble neighbours, to rejoice in their joys and lighten
their griefs with gentle, most efficient sympathy. It was of a
Highland cottage that Dr. Guthrie wrote that "within its walls the
Queen had stood, with her kind hands smoothing the thorns of a dying
man's pillow. There, left alone with him at her own request, she had
sat by the bed of death--a Queen ministering to the comfort of a
saint." It was in a cottage at Osborne that the same gentle and
august almsgiver was found reading comfortable Scripture words to a
sick and aged peasant, quietly retiring upon the entrance of the
clerical visitant, that _his_ message of peace might be freely given,
and thus allowing the sufferer to disclose to the pastor that the
lady in the widow's weeds was Victoria of England. These are
examples, which it would be easy to multiply, of that true oneness of
feeling between the lofty and the lowly which is the special, the
unique glory of Christ's kingdom. May our land never lack them; may
they multiply themselves to all time.

The best evidence of the truth of the Gospel is admittedly its
unequalled power of lifting up humanity to higher and yet higher
levels. In many and mighty instances of that power our age is not
barren. And in despite of the foes without and within that have
wrought her woe--of the Pharisaism that is a mask for fraud, of the
mammon-worship cloaked as respectability, of scepticism lightly
mocking, of the bolder enmity of the blasphemer--w