There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed. * * * * * [Sidenote: Strength of despair.] When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage. * * * * * [Sidenote: Self-forgetfulness.] “Thee uses thyself only to learn how to love neighbor, Ruth,” said Simeon, looking with a beaming face on Ruth. * * * * * [Sidenote: Natural religious sensibility.] He had one of those natures which could better and more clearly conceive of religious things from its own perceptions and instincts than many a matter-of-fact and practical Christian. The gift to appreciate and the sense to feel the finer shades and relations of moral things often seems an attribute of those whose whole life shows a careless disregard of them. Hence, Moore, Byron, Goethe, often speak words more wisely descriptive of the true religious sentiment, than another man whose whole life is governed by it. In such minds, disregard of religion is a more fearful treason,—a more deadly sin. * * * * * [Sidenote: Superstition.] No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man. The Christian is composed by the belief of a wise, all-ruling Father, whose presence fills the void unknown with light and order; but to the man who has dethroned God, the spirit-land is, indeed, in the words of the Hebrew poet, “a land of darkness and the shadow of death,” without any order, where the light is as darkness. Life and death to him are haunted grounds, filled with goblin forms of vague and shadowy dread. * * * * * [Sidenote: The human soul.] After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a human soul is an awful ghostly, unquiet possession for a bad man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful perhapses,—those shudderings and tremblings which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity! What a fool is he who locks his door to keep out spirits, who has in his own bosom a spirit he dares not meet alone,—whose voice, smothered far down, and piled over with mountains of earthliness, is yet like the forewarning trumpet of doom! DRED. [Sidenote: Practical and ideal.]