When Falstaff asks the prince, “Dost thou hear me, Hal?” “Ay, and mark thee too,” is the reply; and that there is a difference between hearing and marking, between lending one ear and giving both, Falstaff knew as well as most men. And could practise what he knew, if occasion prompted. Witness his wilful deafness when taken to task by the Lord Chief Justice. “Boy, tell him I’m deaf,” he bids his page say. So, “You must speak louder, my master’s deaf,” says the boy. “I am sure he is, to the hearing of anything good,” rejoins the Chief Justice. And when, anon, his lordship taxes the incorrigible knight with being deaf to what he is saying, Sir John assures him, with that consummate assurance of his, that he hears him very well: “Rather, an’t please you, it is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal.” Quite capable is that witty profligate of entering into the import of each phrase in the collect on the Holy Scriptures, which prays that we may in such wise hear them, as to mark and learn, and inwardly digest them. A late divine, treating of “animal men” in the “animal” sense of St. Paul, as those who cannot discern spiritual things, but are absorbed in animalism as their being’s end and aim, affirmed that unavailing as it seems to be to talk to them of religion, it avails no more talking of poetry, and art, or speculative science, or the nobler things of the soul: “How can such men discern the things of the Spirit? They understand Tennyson as little as they understand St. Paul.” Having ears they hear not anything so far away as the music of the spheres. Of _that_, and such as that, the animal man might say, by self-application of a couplet of Cowper’s, “For which, alas! my destiny severe, Though ears she gave me two, gave me no ear.” _NOT ALONE IN THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS._ PSALM xxiii. 4. No good thing will He, from whom cometh every good gift, withhold from them that love Him, and that walk uprightly; least of all then His presence when most that presence is indispensable,—as a _very_ present help in trouble. And when so indispensable as in the valley of the shadow of death—darkening more and more unto the perfect night? We must die alone. It is a truism, in its natural sense. But in what the devout mind refuses to call or consider a non-natural sense, the righteous hath companionship as well as hope in his death. He who can say, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, confines not his reliance to the range of green pastures and still waters, but extends it to the glooms of the grave and the swellings of Jordan. Not alone at the last, for the Good Shepherd knoweth His sheep, and is known of them. And how known? For one that will not let them want. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.”