That is a moral which we shall do well to remember. All great possessions materially founded come at last to that, and the heart that clings to them must go down after them to the grave. It is the same when we base our delight of human relationship in an insistence upon possession: it serves only to accentuate the place of death in the world and to give it size. The man, or woman, whose idea of love lies in the claim to possess and to control others, dies many deaths before he reaches his final end, and walks daily with his foot in the grave. These tragedies of possession, so impoverishing to the spirit, are all round us; the world is humanly more full of them than of anything else: Husbands who adore their wives, but cannot let them call their souls their own; parents, possessive of their children, imposing upon them their will up to the legal limit and beyond; homes devouring the independence of womanhood, cramping, constraining, robbing of initiative and force, and doing all these things under cover of the claims of love, of natural affection, of piety! What is all this really but possession masquerading under another name? I remember once reading a remarkable story by Mr. John Gray, called _Niggard Truth_, of a woman who took masterful possession of a weak husband and “ran” him as an expression, not of his own personality, but of hers. And when at last she had very literally run him to earth, she buried him in a garment of red flannel so that, as she expressed it, she might “see him better” in the grave. And there, at the end of a strenuous life, she sat amid her domestic possessions, her glass shades, her family plate, and her mahogany, with her mental eye fixed upon a corpse, and her heart filled with a _Magnificat_ of self-applause. She was the “Ozymandias” of the domestic hearth; and there are thousands of them in this country to-day. “Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!” I have taken for example the domestic relations, because there we get in small, but simple and concise, that demoralising claim to possession which goes forth with missionary zeal to devastate the world; and because here, in the home, the true social service that is owing is, in theory at least, recognised and admitted.