balanced, fixed order, with free spontaneous action; freaks of sportive merriment, free as the wildest play of childhood, with a fixedness of law more exact than the nicest calculations of the mathematicians; "service which is perfect freedom;" delicate beauty with homely utility; lavish abundance with provident care. And everywhere he made us feel that the spring of all this order, the source of all this fullness, the smile through all this humour and play of nature, the soul of all this law, was none other than God. So that often after these morning walks with him we fell into an awed silence, feeling the warm daylight solemn as a starry midnight, with the Great Presence; and entered the church-porch almost with the feeling that we were rather stepping out of the Temple than into it; that, sacred as was the place of worship and of the dead, it was not more sacred or awful than the world of life we left to enter it. The other golden hour of our golden day (for Sunday was ever that to us), was when in the evening he read the Bible with Roger and me in his own room. I cannot remember much that he used to say about it. I only remember how he made us reverence and love it; its fragments of biography which make you know the people better than volumes of narrative; its characters that are never mere incarnations of principles, but men and women; its letters that are never mere sermons concentrated on an individual; its sermons that are never mere dissertations peculiarly applicable to no one time or place, but speeches intensely directed to the needs of one audience, and the circumstances of one place, and therefore containing guiding wisdom for all; its prayers that are never sermons from a pulpit, but brief cries of entreaty from the dust or flaming torrents of adoration piercing beyond the stars, or quiet asking of little children for daily bread; its confessions that are as great drops of blood, wrung slowly from the agony of the heart; its hymns that dart upward singing and soaring in a wild passion of praise and joy. I can recall little of what my father said to us in those evening hours, but I remember that they left on our minds the same kind of joyous sense of having found something inexhaustible which came from our morning walks. They made us feel that in coming to the Bible, as to nature, we come not to a cistern or a stream or a ponded store, though it might be abundant enough for a nation; but to a Fountain, which, though it might seem at times but a gentle bubbling up of waters just enough for the thirsty lips which pressed it, was, nevertheless, living, inexhaustible, eternal, because it welled up from the fullness of God.