apt warning of a pregnant truth, administered by a wise and loving comforter. If I were asked whether there is any one idea more potential than any other over every sort of suffering, in a mode of life like ours, most hearers of the question would make haste to answer for me that there is such a variety of potential ideas, suited to such wide differences of mood of mind and body, that it must be impossible to measure the strength of any one. Nevertheless, I should reply that there is one, to me more powerful at present than I can now conceive any single idea to have been in any former states of my mind. It is this; that it matters infinitely less what we _do_ than what we _are_. I can conceive the amazement of many at this announcement,--of many even who admit its truth, and feelingly admit it, as I myself did when it was first brought home to me from the printed page of one friend by the heart-breathing voice of another. I care not who wonders, and who only half understands, while there are some few to whom this thought may be what it is to me. No one will be so short-sighted as to apply it as an excuse for indolence in the active and healthy,--so clear is it that such cannot _be_ what they ought to be, unless they _do_ all they can. But perhaps it is only the practised in human sorrows who can see far enough into the boundless truth of this thought to appreciate its worth to us. Suffice it here that it has the power I ascribe to it, and that we whom it _has_ consoled long to administer it when we see old age restless in its infirmity, activity disappointed of its scope or instruments, or the most useful agents of society, the most indispensable members of families paralysed by disease. We long to whisper it in the dungeons of Spielberg, where it opens a career within the narrowest recess of those thick walls. We long to send a missive to every couch, of the sick, to every arm-chair of the aged and the blind, reminding them that the great work of life is ours still,--through all modes of life but that of the madhouse,--the formation of a heavenly soul within us. If we cannot pursue a trade or a science, or keep house, or help the state, or write books, or earn our own bread or that of others, we can do the work to which all this is only subsidiary,--we can cherish a sweet and holy temper,--we can vindicate the supremacy of mind over body,--we can, in defiance of our liabilities, minister pleasure and hope to the gayest who come prepared to receive pain from the spectacle of our pain; we can, here as well as in heaven’s courts hereafter, reveal the angel growing into its immortal aspect, which is the highest achievement we could propose to ourselves, or that grace from above could propose to us, if we had a free choice of all possible conditions of human life. If any doubt the worth of the thought, from the common habit of overlooking the importance of what is _done_ in its character of index of what the