his labors, seemingly offering so dreadful an interpretation of the mystical prophecy that accompanied that charge, moved him to no desperation or distress, and still he calmly slept, with as little agitation and dread as at the transfiguration, and at the agony of the crucifixion eve; nor did that compunction for heedless inattention, that then hung upon his slumbering senses, now disturb him in the least. It is really worth noticing, in justice to Peter, that his sleepiness, of which so many curious instances are presented in the sacred narrative, was not of the criminally selfish kind that might be supposed on a partial view. If he slept during his Master’s prayers on Mount Hermon, and in Gethsemane, he slept too in his own condemned cell; and if in his bodily infirmity he had forgotten to watch and pray when death threatened his Lord, he was now equally indifferent to his own impending destruction. He was, evidently, a man of independent and regular habits. Brought up a hard-working man, he had all his life been accustomed to repose whenever he was at leisure, if he needed it; and now too, though the “heathen might rage, and the people imagine a vain thing,――though the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers took counsel together” against him, and doomed him to a cruel death, ――in spite of all these, Peter would sleep when he was sleepy. Not the royal Agrippa could sleep sounder on his pavilioned couch of purple. In the calm confidence of one steadily fixed in a high course, and perfectly prepared for every and any result, the chained apostle gave himself coolly to his natural rest, without borrowing any trouble from the thought, that in the morning the bloody sword was to lay him in “the sleep that knows no earthly waking.” So slept the Athenian sage, on the eve of his martyrdom to the cause of clearly and boldly spoken truth,――a sleep that so moved the wonder of his agonizing disciples, at the power of a good conscience and a practical philosophy to sustain the soul against the horrors of such distress; but a sleep not sounder nor sweeter than that of the poor Galilean outcast, who, though not knowing even the name of philosophy, had a consolation far higher, in the faith that his martyred Lord had taught him in so many experimental instructions. That faith, learned by the painful conviction of his own weakness, and implanted in him by many a fall when over confident in his own strength, was now his stay and comfort, so that he might say to his soul, “Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise him, who is the help of my countenance and my God.” Nor did that hope prove groundless. From him in whom he trusted, came a messenger of deliverance; and from the depths of a danger the most appalling and threatening, he was soon brought, to serve that helping-God through many faithful years, feeding the flock till, in his old age, “another should gird him, and carry him whither he would not.” He who had prayed for him in the revelation of