“What are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten. ‘It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.’ Of all acts, is not, for a man, _repentance_ the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is death: the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact; is dead: it is ‘pure’ as dead dry sand is pure. David’s life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man’s moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle never ended; ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature! is not a man’s walking, in truth, always that: a ‘succession of falls!’ Man can do no other. In this wild element of a Life, he has to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep abased; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle again still onwards. That his struggle be a faithful unconquerable one: this is the question of questions.” THE SORROWS OF THE AFFECTIONS. The loss by death of those we love has the first place in these sorrows. Yet the feeling in this case, even when carried to the highest, is not exactly despair, having too much warmth in it for that. Not much can be said in the way of comfort on this head. Queen Elizabeth, in her hard, wise way, writing to a mother who had lost her son, tells her that she will be comforted in time; and why should she not do for herself what the mere lapse of time will do for her? Brave words! and the stern woman, more earnest than the sage in “Rasselas,” would have tried their virtue on herself. But I fear they fell somewhat coldly on the mother’s ear. Happily, in these bereavements, kind Nature with her opiates, day by day administered, does more than all the skill of the physician moralists. Sir Thomas Browne says,