"Nothing but leaves! No gathered sheaves of life's fair ripening grain;

We sow our seeds; lo! tares and weeds, words, idle words, for earnest deeds

Then reap, with toil and pain, nothing but leaves ! nothing but leaves !

"Nothing but leaves! Sad mem'ry weaves, no veil to hide the past:

And as we trace our weary way, and count each lost and misspent day,

We sadly find at last-nothing but leaves! nothing but leaves !

"Ah, who shall thus the Master meet, and bring but withered

leaves?

Ah, who shall at the Saviour's feet, before the awful judg

ment seat,

Lay down for golden sheaves, nothing but leaves ! nothing but leaves !"

"I'll

I am afraid of the face which is hard. "I will never forgive her as long as I live!" said a woman whose face of granite revealed a heart of stone. have my pound," exclaims Shylock in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," and the hatred in the face and the vengeance in the eye arrested our gaze more than the empty scales and the glittering knife which were to cut and weigh the "pound of flesh." The man who "gets even" with his enemy drops to his enemy's level. Hatred is contraction. Love is life. A grudge is a self-inflicted curse. The memory of a wrong, fondly fostered in the secret hours of thought, will take the colour out of your cheek, the light out of your eye, the expression out of your face and rob you of your peace.

Give me the face which is full of tenderness, kindness, sympathy and love. Henry Ward Beecher was fond of telling a story of his father, the famous old Dr. Lyman Beecher. Dr. Beecher was, for years, pastor of a church at East Hampton, Mass. Hampton was, at that time, a veritable hotbed of infidelity. It was while the Beecher family resided at East Hampton that Harriet (the first child by that name in the Lyman Beecher family) died, and was buried in the village burying plot. When the Beecher family finally left East Hampton the only treasure not removed was the grave of little Harriet. Years afterwards one of the most pronounced infidel leaders of the place turned to his wife one day and said: "Wife, I can't bear to have that little child of Dr. Beecher left out there, all alone"-and so the big hearted agnostic dug out the little coffin, and removed it to his own plot in the cemetery, and in that plot there may be found to-day three graves: on one side, the grave of the infidel-on the other side the grave of his wife-and between them the grave of Harriet. May it not be that the infidel was growing warm towards God, and that in the hour of his great tenderness, when he took the cold, silent, enclosed form of a neighbour's child to his bosom, in one supreme act of kindness, that the angel spirit of the dead child became a spiritual messenger to his soul and the guide of his future years, bringing into full realization the beautiful words of the prophet: "A little child shall lead them." There is hope for a man if his heart be kind; and a kind heart always

sends its rich red blood to give quality to the complexion, colour to the cheek, spiritual splendour to the eye, and tenderness to the face. Tenderness

maketh a man's face to beam.

Thomas Carlyle had a very practical habit of placing before him, in full view, a photograph of the hero whose biography he was perusing. Thus the character became real to him in the hour of his meditation, and inspirations were kindled which otherwise would have been unknown. It is with the hope of even a higher inspiration that I present to you a divine portrait-the sweetest face I ever saw-"The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

"Gaze for one moment on that face whose beauty wakes the world's great anthem." I present to you to-day a beautiful Christ, concerning whom oldfashioned saints used to speak as "The Lily of the Valley,' ""The Rose of Sharon," "The Chief Among Ten Thousand," and "The One Altogether Lovely." "Oh, voice, oh, chime, oh, chant divine!" "The sea hath its pearls, the heavens hath its stars, but my heart, my heart, hath its love." "No mortal can with Him compare among the sons of men."

"Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills my breast;
But sweeter far Thy face to see
And in Thy presence rest.”

V

THE LAW OF HOPE

The Soul's Guarantee of Immortality

T

HE most startling question ever asked by the philosophers of ancient history is expressed in eight words: "If a man die, shall he live again?"

Next to life, the most universal thing is death. Dead cities. Dead nations. Dead empires. Dead civilizations. Death is universal. This is the world of the dead. Two million persons died on this continent last year. Fifty thousand "pass over" for every hour of the day and night. Death ruleth! Death reigneth!

We stand at the black door of Death in the midnight of our sorrow and ask, "What does it mean?" We repeat to ourselves the question asked by Robert Browning, "What does death mean; is it total extinction or a passage into life?" Ingersoll repeats the interrogation in another form: "What is death; is it a door or a wall?" Oh, how stupendous the question! "If I believed in immortality, I would never worry about anything in this world," said Harriet Martineau. "I had always supposed that there was no hereafter," said the dying sensualist to me. Shakespeare gathers up the fears of the race

and expresses them in those noble, oft-quoted words, "For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil."

But we have found an answer to the question of the ages. That which is universal must be beneficial. The outline of the darkest shadow leads to the light. By the logical supremacy of certain universal laws we reason out, to our own satisfaction, the final and everlasting survival of the soul. No man can, logically, reason himself away from the thought of immortality. We propound such tests as these :What does the Bible say? What does science say? What does common sense say? What is the verdict of the soul? In answer, I bring you the logic of ten universal laws.

I.-We reason by the law of a progressive development in nature. Everything in nature points upward. Upward towards the final. Upward towards the invisible. Upward towards the spiritual. Nature is divided into realms. Each realm is a kingdom. The lower a realm is, the coarser and more material it seems to be. The higher a realm is, the finer and more spiritual it seems to be. Follow nature's evolution upward-upward towards the invisible-and you have matter, solid, liquid and atmospherical. In the atmosphere you have light, heat, and energy. Energy-or force-is invisible. Nature always leads to the invisible. Follow nature and you will find the invisible. First ice, then water, then steam-vapour-force, energy,invisibility Study yonder plant on your sitting