or we may remember the "Hymns to Night" of Novalis, and that experience known to so many saints, which St. John of the Cross speaks of as "the obscure night of the soul," the darkness which we needs must traverse before we come to know the greater light beyond. The stern angel of pain seems to many a fiend; but some have found him to be a friend at the last, and certainly there is something in the heart of sorrow that no other experience brings to us, unless it be great joy, and as we feel it, we seem to understand that the spirit of joy and the spirit of sorrow are angels near akin. In the world that man has made there is one thing above all others through which the influences of evil seem to work, the devil's sacrament of money. When one thinks of the hatreds and lusts springing to birth around it, and the curse it so often seems to bring alike to "him that gives and him that takes," when one sees wealth, [p.81] remorseless in its pride of power, worshipped and cringed to by its recipients and its courtiers, it is easy to understand how a simple Christlike man like St. Francis would have no dealings with money, and shunned to touch it as we might some plague-infected garment. And yet how often has this hateful thing been redeemed from its base use to be the minister of right. Even money is not hopelessly lost for good. The sacramental efficacy of the widow's mite has not ceased through all the centuries since she cast it, in her humility, into God's treasury. The sand hides the gold of Pharaoh, and the imperial treasures of Augustus are vanished and forgotten, but that poor woman's gift still goes on: she gave to God, to the best and highest that she knew, and in giving, little thought that through the word of the Master of Masters, her tiny coin could become for ever a sacrament to humanity. So may a little thing and a base thing be made a symbol of good; most of all then should we find a channel of revelation in the highest thing we know; not only in the sacrament of nature, but in the sacrament of man.