“With the ambiguous earth His dealings have been told us; these abide: The signal to a maid, the human birth, The lesson, and the Young Man crucified.” But do the other planets of our solar system, do the stars, those countless suns controlling countless planets--know aught of God’s way of dealing with our Earth? Or can we even in loftiest flight of thought conceive “in what guise He walked the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear?” Then the good glad confidence of the soul in touch with God, in tune with the Infinite, in Te Deum ecstasy of exultation, overflows in the concluding lines: “Oh, be prepared, my soul; To read the unconceivable, to scan The million forms of God those stars unroll When in our turn we show to them--a Man.” They are indeed blessed in whom dwells this abiding confidence, and for whom at times at least, there is overflow in Te Deum exaltation. The slaughter-fields of history and rivers rolling red; the answerless Whys wailing from out the past forlorn as Pharaoh-ghosts in search of non-existent mummies; the chaos of it all, from Memphis to modern Cairo; the damnable wrongs, the demon cruelties, the awful sufferings, the hellish horrors--all sound sonoral in orchestral harmony when faith and hope and good glad confidence play dominant and the soul is exultant in God. DEATH OF CHARLES. Charles XII. never rallied from the defeat of Pultowa. He did, indeed, linger for a time in Turkey, striving to enlist the sympathies of the Sultan in his behalf. And history relates that at last the Sultan yielded to the importunities of Charles, and that an army was fitted out for the invasion of Russia: but the command of the forces was entrusted to the Vizier, not to Charles. And the story runs that the Russians were completely trapped by the Turkish troops and Pultowa seemed about to be avenged and the hand of destiny turned backward; when Catherine, later the wife of Peter the Great and first Empress of Russia, seeing the hopelessness of exit from the trap into which the Russians had fallen, went secretly by night into the tent of the Grand Vizier, and by her charms, and by her gifts of gold, diamonds, and pearls bribed the stern old soldier so that he failed to see the following day that the Russians were secretly stealing away from the trap in which he had caught them. Charles withdrew to Sweden and, a war having broken out between Norway and Sweden, he was killed at the siege of Frederickshall: but just how he met death is not authoritatively known. He was found dead in the trenches the night preceding the battle. Voltaire has sympathetically told the story of Charles XII. of Sweden. His meteoric career has often been used, as Johnson happily said, “to point a moral or adorn a tale.” He ranks with Alexander and Napoleon in personal magnetism, in phenomenal attainment, and in the ultimate loss and evanishment of all attained. His name and fame are ever subtly suggestive of--