How beautiful and how pure is the position of God's ministers! All that is good dwells around them,--religion, poetry, and the life of a shepherd of souls; whilst other professions oft serve only to choke up this goodly neighborhood. Son and father seemed to live in one another, and on the site of filial and paternal love there arose the structure of a rare and singular friendship. Gottreich not only cheered his father by the new birth of his lost poet's youth, but by the still more beautiful similarity of their faith. In days gone by, a minister who sent his son to the public theological schools might expect him to return the sworn antagonist of all that he had himself daily prayed to at the altar in the discharge of his office: the son returned to his father's roof as a missionary sent to convert the heathen, or as an antichrist. There may have been sorrows of a father, which, though all unspoken, were deeper than a mother's sorrows. But times are perhaps better now. Gottreich, though he entered the high schools with his share of the uppish, quibbling of early youth, returned with the faith of his ancestors and of his father. For he had studied under instructors who had taught him to cling rather to the teachings of the old faith than to the ingenious explanations of the commentators, and who had exposed to the light alone what is serviceable to man, as to a plant, and to its outward growth, but not the roots perniciously. Thus the father found again his old Christian heart sending forth new shoots in the bosom of his Gottreich, and moreover the best justification of the convictions of his life and of his love. If it be pain to us to love and at the same time to contradict, to refuse with the head what the heart grants, it is all the sweeter to us to find ourselves and our faith transplanted forwards in a younger being. Life is then a beautiful night, in which not one star goes down but another rises in its place.