st completed, 'and that is SIN.' By one stroke the
intended effect was produced, and the rising disgust and horror
transferred from the revolting material image to the great moral
evil.

We had fondly hoped that for a man so singularly gifted, and who had
but reached the ripe maturity of middle life, there remained important
work yet to do. He seemed peculiarly fitted, if but placed in a
commanding sphere, for ministering to some of the intellectual wants,
and for withstanding with singular efficiency some of the more
perilous tendencies, of the religious world in the present day. That
Athenian thirst for the new so generally abroad, and which many have
so unhappily satisfied with the unwholesome and the pernicious, he
could satisfy with provision at once sound and novel. And no man of
the age had more thoroughly studied the prevailing theological errors
of the time in their first insidious approaches, or could more
skilfully indicate the exact point at which they diverge from the
truth. But his work on earth is for ever over; and the sense of
bereavement is deepened by the reflection that, save in the memory of
a few, he has left behind him no adequate impress of the powers of his
understanding or of the fineness of his genius. It is strange how much
the lack of a single ingredient in a man's moral constitution--and
that, too, an ingredient in itself of a low and vulgar cast--may
affect one's whole destiny. It was the grand defect of this gifted
man, that that sentiment of self-esteem, which seems in many instances
so absurd and ridiculous a thing, and which some, in their little
wisdom, would so fain strike out from among the components of human
character, was almost wholly awanting. As the minister of an attached
provincial congregation, a sense of duty led him to study much and
deeply; and he poured forth _viva voce_ his full-volumed and
many-sparkling tide of eloquent idea as freely and richly as the
nightingale, unconscious of a listener, pours forth her melody in the
shade. But he could not be made to understand or believe, that what so
impressed and delighted the privileged few who surrounded him was
equally suited to impress and delight the many outside, or that he was
fitted to speak through the press in tones which would compel the
attention not merely of the religious, but also of the literary world.
And so his exquisitely-toned thinking perished like the music of the
bygone years, has died with himself, or