CHAPTER XIX.

THE SOUL EVER IN THE SIGHT OF GOD.

"Nathanael saith unto Him, Whence knowest Thou me ? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God."ST. JOHN i. 48, 49.

Soul-giving voice of God that spoke of old,

Speaks still, and he who hears is crowned with gold."

"Thrice blest is he to whom is given

The instinct that can tell

That God is on the field, when He
Is most invisible."

W. B. SCOTT.

F. W. FABER.

sphere of work We may not be

In our own home, in our own little and duty, our place is recognized. very important or influential people, but each of us at least is somebody; each feels he has individuality, rights, duties, responsibilities. But let us go to some great city that is not our home, and how lonely, how unimportant we become! what a small thing it seems what we do or suffer, desire or fear! The crowd surges by us, and each of us is but one

of the crowd, an item in the stream, nothing to any one, pushed aside by this person, stared at vacantly by that person, utterly ignored by all ; they care not who we are, whither we go, what we do; on they come, on they go; what a sea of faces! what a seething torrent of humanity! what a drug men and women seem! what has become of individuality?

Or look out of the carriage window as you whirl along hour after hour in a long day's journey from one end of England to the other. Yonder is a town with thousands of men and women living in it; not one of them ever heard of you, not one of them has any idea of your existence; your birth, your marriage, your death are absolutely uninteresting to them. The town is passed; yonder is a lonely farmhouse. What do you know of its inhabitants, or they of you? what do they care for you, or you for them? You stop at a place you knew as a child, you look into every face at the station; there is not one that you recognize; you are unknown, forgotten.

Take up a map; look at India with its vast population; notice the growing breadth of cities and towns in North America; think of China, of Asia; put your finger on some small place you never heard the name of before. There are men, women, and children there; there are morning and evening, working, sleeping, dying; and what is it all to you? and what are you to those whose life is spent in that little distant, unknown village?

We begin to feel very small, very insignificant. But there are more thoughts of this kind yet. Take up a book of history; read of battles, of the building and growth of cities, of discoveries, of mighty revolutions and catastrophes. What were you, where were you, when these things were? "The smallest insect that floated on the evening air was of more worth than you, for it was, and you were not." Your little present life is like the link of some chain that you see for a moment passing, but what is before and behind is unseen, unknown.

Look at that piece of ancient sculpture. A living man thought out the design, laboured at it day by day, ate and slept, and worked again, rejoiced in his skill and in the beauty of his work; and in time it was finished, it was sold, it was put in a place of honour, looked at, admired, it became a familiar thing for years, and for generation after generation. Where are the hands that wrought, the eyes that gazed, the model that gave the idea? Where are the people that lived then? Dead, and their very dust perished and gone these thousand years twice told! and you will so die, and your memory perish.

But let us take one more thought, and let it be wide enough this time to leave no room for anything beyond it. Listen to yonder man of science as he discourses of what he says has been, and of what will be in the great creation; he takes up pieces of rock and fossils, he peers through his microscope, and he reads the records of ages till we get giddy with their interminable length, and shrink into

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utter insignificance. Years seem scarcely worth mentioning, and the lifetime of man an inappreciable atom of time. Nay, man and his whole history seem as nothing. Nay, nay, this world itself shrinks to a speck, and passes utterly out of sight, out of thought, when the tremendous vastness of orbs and systems is spoken of. He looks on, that man of thought and research, to some almost infinitely distant age, when the sun shall have burned itself low and its power be weak, when its planets shall drop one after another into its vast cauldron, and make it blaze up for awhile, but only to delay its own dissolution a little; he looks on still, and sees this sickly sun reeling in spiral orbit round some vaster centre, till it also is sucked into the vortex, and sun mingles with still more mighty sun, and leaves space without orbs or light. And yet he sees this going on-systems collapsing, and perhaps a new order of creation arising out of the tremendous catastrophes; he uses time and space and matter in a manner that defies all measures we can conceive; we can but stand silent, awe-struck, bewildered.

For there comes the thought, And what is man in all this? What am I? O poor little atom, what am I? What matters it what I am, what I do, what I undergo? The tiny insect that creeps across a leaf in my hands and seems to find it a world too large for it, this seems vast, compared with my littleness, as I think of the immensity of time and space and creation. Let us eat and

drink, for to-morrow we die; let us do what we like best, for what can it matter? We see what has become of those who have lived before us; a few years, a few centuries, and it will be the same with us as with them, all our life and doings passed away and gone and forgotten, gone as if they had never been.

Do we ever think and reason so? Do we ever come, by this or any other process, to doubt our responsibility, almost to argue against our individuality? Turn we then to the old Book; we shall find a remedy for this most miserable mental ailing, a rectifying of the distorted compass of life that was leading us to reckless despair and utter destruction, a shipwreck of of our our whole being. Read what St. John tells us about the call of Nathanael. For who was this Nathanael, but one of these poor little atoms of humanity? He is sitting thinking, perhaps as we sit and think, sad and bewildered sometimes, overmastered with some hard question or some secret grief, and ready to envy the little insect that creeps briskly and cheerfully across the fig-leaf under his eye, living its little careless life without heartache. And who is this that faces him now, whom he never saw before, and who yet calls him familiarly by his own name; and when questioned about this, amazes him yet more by reminding him of where he was when Philip found him, and by His eye that, looking straight into his, silently spoke some yet more convincing proof that He knew his thoughts then, and