Then champions to thine arms were sent; From Denmark thunders Tordenskiol', Path of the Dane to fame and might! Receive thy friend, who, scorning flight, And amid pleasures and alarms, FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER. Born in Calverley, Yorkshire, England, June 28, 1814; died at the Oratory, Brompton, London, September 26, 1863. As a hymn writer he is known throughout the Christian world. In spite of bodily weakness, Faber was most devoted to his clerical calling; an eloquent preacher, of saintly life, and universally beloved. His hymns are characterized by nobility of thought and simplicity in expression. THE RIGHT MUST WIN OH, it is hard to work for God, He hides Himself so wondrously, Or He deserts us at the hour And seems to leave us to ourselves Yes, there is less to try our faith Workmen of God! oh, lose not heart, And in the darkest battle-field Thou shalt know where to strike. Thrice blest is he to whom is given That God is on the field when He Blest too is he who can divine Where real right doth lie, And dares to take the side that seems For right is right, since God is God; To falter would be sin. THE LAND BEYOND THE SEA THE Land beyond the Sea! When will life's task be o'er? When shall we reach that soft blue shore, O'er the dark strait whose billows foam and roar? When shall we come to thee, Calm Land beyond the Sea? The Land beyond the Sea! How close it often seems, When flushed with evening's peaceful gleams; And the wistful heart looks o'er the strait, and dreams! It longs to fly to thee, Calm Land beyond the Sea! The Land beyond the Sea! How dark our present home! By the dull beach and sullen foam How wearily, how drearily we roam, Calm Land beyond the Sea! The Land beyond the Sea! Why fadest thou in light? Why art thou better seen towards night? Dear Land! look always plain, look always bright, That we may gaze on thee, Calm Land beyond the Sea! FREDERIC WILLIAM FARRAR FREDERIC WILLIAM FARRAR, Dean of Canterbury. Born in Bombay, India, August 7, 1831; died March 22, 1903. Author of "The Witness of History to Christ," "Life and Works of St. Paul," "The Early Days of Christianity," "Eternal Hope," "The Origin of Language," "Chapters on Language," "Families of Speech," "Language and Languages," and "The Life of Christ," which had an immense circulation. (From "THE EARLY DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY") THE CORRUPTION OF ROME THE epoch which witnessed the early growth of Christianity was an epoch of which the horror and the degradation have rarely been equaled, and perhaps never exceeded, in the annals of mankind. Were we to form our sole estimate of it from the lurid picture of its wickedness, which St. Paul in more than one passage has painted with a few powerful strokes, we might suppose that we were judging it from too lofty a standpoint. We might be accused of throwing too dark a shadow upon the crimes of Paganism, when we set it as a foil to the luster of an ideal holiness. But even if St. Paul had never paused amid his sacred reasonings to affix his terrible brand upon the pride of Heathenism, there would still have been abundant proofs of the abnormal wickedness which accompanied the decadence of ancient civilization. They are stamped upon its coinage, cut on its gems, painted upon its chamber-walls, sown broadcast over the pages of its poets, satirists, and historians. "Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant!" Is there any age which stands so instantly condemned by the bare mention of its rulers as that which recalls the successive names of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, and which after a brief gleam of better examples under Vespasian and Titus, sank at last under the hideous tyranny of a Domitian? Is there any age of which the evil characteristics force themselves so instantaneously upon the mind as that of which we mainly learn the history and moral condition from the relics of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the satires of Persius and Juvenal, the epigrams of Martial, and the terrible records of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dion Cassius? And yet even beneath this lowest deep, there is a lower deep; for not even on their dark pages are the depths of Satan so shamelessly laid bare to human gaze as they are in the sordid fictions of Petronius and of Apuleius. But to dwell upon the crimes and the retributive misery of that period is happily not my duty. I need but make a passing allusion to its enormous wealth; its unbounded self-indulgence; its coarse and tasteless luxury; its greedy avarice; its sense of insecurity and terror; its apathy, debauchery, and cruelty; its hopeless fatalism; its unspeakable sadness and weariness; its strange extravagances alike of infidelity and of superstition. At the lowest extreme of the social scale were millions of slaves, without family, without religion, without possessions, who had no recognized rights, and towards whom none had any recognized duties, passing normally from a childhood of degradation to a manhood of hardship, and an old age of unpitied neglect. Only a little above the slaves stood the lower classes, who formed the vast majority of the free-born inhabitants of the Roman Empire. They were, for the most part, beggars and idlers, familiar with the grossest indignities of an unscrupulous dependence. Despising a life of honest industry, they asked only for bread and the games of the circus, and were ready to support any government, even the most despotic, if it would supply these needs. They spent their mornings in lounging about the Forum, or in dancing attendance at the levees of patrons, for a share in whose largesses they daily struggled. They spent their afternoons and evenings in gossiping at the Public Baths, in listlessly enjoying the polluted plays of the theater, or looking with fierce thrills of delighted horror at the bloody sports of the arena. At night they crept up to their miserable garrets in the sixth and seventh stories of the huge insula - the lodging-houses of Rome - into which, as into the low lodging-houses of the poorer quarters of London, there drifted all that was most wretched and most vile. Their life, as it is described for us by their contemporaries, was largely made up of squalor, misery, and vice. Immeasurably removed from these needy and greedy freemen, and living chiefly amid crowds of corrupted and obsequious slaves, stood the constantly diminishing throng of the wealthy |