to many of your countrymen; and some of you by feeling now the bitterness of doubt may be prepared for proclaiming to others a Gospel of glorious certainty.

Only cultivate the habit of high, unselfish hopefulness; for believe me the time is coming when this virtue will be peculiarly needed by all those who are called upon to act as guides to others. Destined as you are to perform the work of your mature manhood towards the close of a century and (in the ordinary course of things) after the close of a long and beneficent reign, you must look forward to a time when the minds of men will be far more unsettled than at present, and when multitudes will be ready, perhaps too ready, to welcome any change. In such a condition of things the guide who forms foolish hopes will lead to failure, and the guide who forms exaggerated hopes will lead to disappointment, but the guide who has formed no hopes will lead no whither: for there will be none to follow him; he has forfeited all claim to lead. He who aspires to be a guide and leader of others cannot dispense with that energy which springs from hopefulness and which will enable him to resist rash innovations no less than to further wise reforms.

Therefore in order that you may be hopeful to the last, begin early to put away all false unworthy hopes. Banish altogether from your heart the notion that God makes favourites either of nations or individuals, and crush as entirely unworthy

the fancy that He will suspend His laws for your pleasure, or that He will care for you to the exclusion or depreciation of your neighbours. Meditate much upon the justice of God, and accustom yourself to build your hopes upon that; remembering always that the divine justice of the heavenly Father can be in no wise inferior to the justice that was defined by Plato to be the art of doing that which is best for all.

Then, when you are freed from all petty, puerile, narrow prayers, when you have put away each selfish expectation, and each desire that is antagonistic to God's orderly laws, you may be sure that your every hope will be crowned with some fulfilment. Then nothing will seem too high, nothing too good and pure to become the subject of aspiration; and reversing the ordinary language you will be able no longer to say about your brightest anticipations, They are too good to be true, but rather They are too good not to be true.

Yet forget not that hope must go hand in hand with faith; and faith includes or implies that dull prosaic virtue which we sometimes find it hard to practise, the virtue of patience. The man that hopes can afford to be patient and to wait. Wait then as well as work. Do not hope to crowd into the three or four years of your work up here the formation of all the judgments and principles upon which you are to base the action of a lifetime. Be content to believe that as regards the nature and objects of life, life itself may have much

to teach you; and where books fail you in your search for truth, determine not to give up the search as futile till you have taken experience as your tutor. Wait therefore in hope: wait thou still on the Lord; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart. Trust in the Lord and do good delight thyself also in the Lord and He shall give thee the desire of thine heart; trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.

HOPE FOR THE
THE DEAD.

He is risen: he is not here.-ST. MARK XVI. 6.

THE memory of the dead seems intended to serve as a kind of ladder for the living, whereon they may ascend from things seen to things unseen. As we grow older and more imbued with the spirit of this world, it seems ordained that thoughts of death and of the dead should grow proportionately stronger so as to imbue us with the spirit of another world. Infants and children, being unworldly, do not need, and do not have, this antidote against worldliness: for the disappearance of two or three kindly care-worn countenances from the midst of a child's thoughtless gambols leaves no permanent impression upon the little one's mind. But as age brings us more and more within the danger of the infection of this world, death presses his keen antidote closer and closer to our lips.

It is indeed a bitter medicine, the cup of desolation. Those whom we most respected and revered, those who were to our simple childhood as gods,

these fall the first. Old and wise friends and counsellors, teachers, parents, pass away, depriving us of the support and guidance with which we had supposed we never could dispense. Then, if not before, gaps are discerned and faces missed. in the rank of our own advancing generation; brothers and sisters, friends and schoolfellows, dropping around us, convert pleasant places into sad solitudes and make a wilderness of a home. New ties are formed, but they cannot bring complete oblivion of those that each year sees shattered; and even the new ties death sometimes with his premature touch proves to be as frail as the old. Such then is one aspect of God's ordinance of death. It produces a solitude for the living, a solitude that increases from youth onward till the grave.

Yet God-who Himself pronounced that it is not good for man to be alone-did not, we may be sure, ordain this law of the encroachment of desolation for each human spirit without a divine purpose. Accordingly we find that this seeming solitude has been in reality peopled with active influences; and the memories of the dead have been very potent workers in the hearts of the living. The influence of the dead upon the living has apparently prevailed in proportion as the human being has risen above the brute creation. With the beasts of the field it is less powerful: with them, as with children, to be out of sight is to be out of mind. Yet even in some of the higher