Who can explain moods? A strange depression has been over me to-day, as of some impending danger to some life near to mine. I shook it off in going out, but I found myself imagining the saddest thing that could possibly happen to me or my friends, or the country, or the world. I do not think I dread any one thing for myself, yet the removal of some of my friends would leave life very lonely. January 16. Yesterday I was much instructed and helped by reading one or two of Maurice’s sermons. The thought that forgiveness means the putting away of sins is not often emphasized as he does it,--“Power _on earth_ to forgive sins;” that here one can lay down the burden, and go on fighting the enemy with a sure hope of conquest, because of that divine life and strength that comes through a present Christ;--this is release indeed. Not that we shall be forgiven, but that we are forgiven, if we turn to the truth in the love of it. And the thought of the Communion service as a marriage-supper, a token that our lives are reunited to the divine life, came to me with new force. Mr. Brooks preached about heaven, in the afternoon; that it must be the continuance of life,--of the highest and deepest we know here. There always will be for us, God, and the “charity” which means love. He spoke from chapter xiii., I. Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass darkly,”--carrying out the image of life blurred and distorted often to us here, made clear there, where only true things can remain. Keble says, for yesterday, that we may-- “Through the world’s sad day of strife Still chant his morning song.” And why should not the music of heaven be the continuing of what is the true harmony of earth? It must be. The sermon yesterday referred especially to the death of two ministers in the Church the past week, Dr. Stone and John Cotton Smith. January 23. Remarks at table, where surely people talk very freely. One lady says that she has never for an hour been glad that she was born. I can scarcely think of such a thing as possible, because it is God’s world, and if we have any real glimpse of Him we must know that there is a divine purpose in our being here, even if we do not have the “good time” in life that we think we deserve. But it may be an inherited morbid feeling, it may be an affectation,--it may be several things.