I finished my little book last week,--“As It Is in Heaven.” I wonder if it was presumptuous in me to write it? But it seemed to grow by itself, and I wanted to give the blossoms and fruit that had shaped themselves in my mind, to those who might enjoy them, and perhaps get some refreshment and strength from them. I trust it will be of service to somebody. April 3. Lent has passed, and Passion Week, and Easter. All these festivals now mean so much to me, and yet not wholly for themselves, but because they make the whole year sacred. I have attended all the morning services, and have found it good to begin the days with that half-hour of prayer and thought, and communion with others. Once I should have thought this frequent assembling together day after day, and week after week, for religious services, at least unnecessary. But for the deepening life that has come to me through them I can never be sufficiently thankful, and I feel that the Church holds through them a special power over the spiritual life of the community. For the last weeks of winter and first weeks of spring, everybody is reminded that this life of ours belongs to us through the life and death of Christ our Lord. We are always forgetting that,--always falling back into ourselves and our own petty interests and plans and thoughts of and for ourselves. I cannot see why Churches of every name should not keep Lent and Good Friday and Easter, as they do Christmas, and I believe they are moving in that direction. I was present at the Good Friday evening service at the Old South, presided over by its pastor, Rev. Mr. Gordon, where a Baptist, a Unitarian, a Congregationalist, and three Episcopal clergymen took part. It was most impressive, and seemed like a promise of the time when all Christ’s people shall be one. The Good Friday sermon at Trinity Church in the morning was to me a new unfolding of a thought that has always perplexed me, from the text, “The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin.” I could never make the “Atonement,” as set forth by the religious teachers of my youth, a reality to myself; Christ Himself was always real, as a divine man, and as a living presence with us still, but how His death was to us more than His Life, I could never see. The grandeur of it all,--the love that inspired the sacrifice, always moved my being to its depths, but the prominence given to His “Blood-shedding” seemed unnatural. It was tragic; pictorial; yet somehow outside of me--a scene upon which I gazed, and wondered, and longed to understand. I cannot recall the words of Mr. Brooks’s sermon, but the feeling and the thought left with me from it was that now I could see it all; and that through that completed sacrifice, the divine life entered into every human soul that could open to receive it. And it is the very thought of the blood, which represents, and _is_, the life, that made it clear.