What are the so called dangerous classes? They live, they do not starve; they live on honest people. Judges, police, and jailers are fed by those who never trouble them. Crime is like a leech on the body, it will have blood. The wrongdoers are not the thorn hedge which we need for our protection, but the thistle, which has rare powers of reproduction, and uses the wind as its chariot to ride to other lands. Is it any wonder that wickedness is so difficult to eradicate? Those of us who have tried to keep our gardens free have sorrowed many a time when we have thought that the rain, so welcome to our newly-born flowers, will call into vigour the enemy that tries to strangle them. And this is but a figure of the terrible truth that prosperity to a nation always means a growth of crime, and that any event, even a public holiday, which should refresh and recuperate, means the resurrection of violence and an increase of suffering. 5. The first lie dug the first grave, and has never ceased to dig others. We have often imagined the scene when Abel was missed--when his mother questioned his murderer as to where he had last seen his brother. How they would listen for his step, until suspense could be no longer borne, and the father would go out, only to find the corpse of his beloved child! Can we not hear the mother cry out, as she touches the cold clay--"Would to God I had died the day I believed the lie!" What a picture for a painter like Rembrandt would that first funeral be! And what are churchyards and cemeteries but the proofs that the devil lied? Have you a grave? Does the clay cover the form once dearer than life to you? Let it plead with you to believe God and his word, rather than to trust to the old serpent. Let us be thankful that the seed of the woman is the Saviour of Men. Eden is not all shadow, even after the loss of purity. There is a promise yet to be fulfilled. "'Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,' saith the Lord." The devil is to be cast into the bottomless pit, and even those whom he has deceived may go to a paradise where the trail of the serpent shall be no more seen. "The Son of God was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil," and the time is coming when war, slavery, ignorance, tyranny, hunger, and sin shall be among the dark clouds that roll away, as the sun which shall never set rises above the horizon to make glad the children of men. Then shall the prophecy of the poet become history-- "In Him the tribes of Adam boast More blessings than their father lost." LIX. WHAT WAS LEARNED IN GOD'S HOUSE. ISAIAH vi.