I wonder if it can be that, after all, it leads to more good to fight out the great battles of right and wrong in this way, than syllogistically, in Dr. Stewart and Dr. Henderson's way. The logical battles making good men fierce, and not hurting the bad at all; the battles for life and death making good men nobler, at all events, even if they make the bad men worse. Making good men better seems the end of so many things that God permits or orders in this world. And as to making bad men worse, it seems as if that could not be helped, because everything does that until they change the direction they are going in, which great troubles and dangers sometimes startle them to do. If this be so, the pain and misery and death would cease to be so perplexing. Aunt Dorothy used to say, a Church without a rod in her hand is a Church without sinews. But a Church with a rod seems sometimes as blind and severe in using it as the world. For which reason, I suppose, the best periods of Church history seem often to be those in which the world holds the rod instead of the Church. And a war may sometimes be as effectual an instrument of godly discipline as a synod. LETTICE'S DIARY. "_June_ 14_th_, 1645, _Davenant Hall, Three o'clock in the morning_.--We came home yesterday, and I grudge to sleep away any of these first hours in the old house. It is like travelling into some marvellous foreign country, to rise at an unwonted hour in the morning. The sky looks so much higher before the roof of daylight has quite spread over it. For after all, daylight is a roof shutting us in to our own green sunny home of earth. And that is partly what makes the night so awful. We stand roofless at night, open to all the other worlds, with no walls or bounds on any side. And at dawn something of the boundlessness and awfulness are still left. With a majestical slow pomp the morning sweeps the veil of sunlight over star after star, falling in grand solemn folds of purple and crimson as it touches the edge of our world, until the great spaces of the upper worlds are all shut out, and we are shut in with our own kindly sun, and our own many-coloured fleeting clouds, and our own green earth. "Then the other aspect of the dawn begins. Her first steps and movements are all grand and silent. But when the awful infinity beyond is shut out, and we are left alone, face to face with her, she changes altogether. "The stars pass away in silence. But the day awakes with all kinds of joyful sounds. The clouds are transformed from solemn purple banners in some great martial or sacred procession to royal or bridal draperies. They garland the earth with roses, they strew pearls and diamonds; they spread the path of the new sun with cloth of gold. The whole world, earth, and sky, seems to blossom into colour, like a flower from its sheath. Every leaf of the limes outside my window, every spike of the horse-chestnuts seems to awake with a flutter of joy.