There is a wicket gate towards which they are making progress, and it is the portal of a city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. They who professedly sojourn here as in a strange country, who obey the call to go out into a place which they shall after receive for an inheritance; who confess, and act on the confession, that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth; they that say and do such things declare plainly that they seek a country, a better country—that is, a heavenly.

Chaucer's "old style" conveys a meaning the world can never be too old to learn:

"Here is no home, here is but wyldyrnesse.

Forth, pilgrime! forth, best out of thy stalle!
Look up on hye, and thonke God of alle ;
Weyve thy lust, and let thy goste thee lede,1
And trouthe shall thee delyver, it is no drede."

We are strangers and sojourners before God, as were all our fathers. By faith it was that Abraham sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; in tabernacles, that bespeak the stranger and pilgrim upon earth; not in houses built to endure. For he confessed, and denied not, but confessed that here he had no continuing city. True, a citizen he was of no mean city. But it was not of the earth, earthy. For he looked for a city which hath foundations, more everlasting than the hills. Meanwhile, God's statutes were his songs in the house of his pilgrimage.

The Bird of God is Wordsworth's epithet for that "resplendent wanderer" called by Eastern islanders the Bird of Heaven, and by us of the West, Bird of Paradise; and, as usual with the serenely meditative bard of Rydal, there is moral, nay, religious teaching in the symbolism of his strain :

"The Bird of God! whose blessed will

She seems performing as she flies

1 That is, "Let thy spirit (goste), not thy appetite, lead thee." In St. Peter's words, "Abstain from fleshly lusts."

Over the earth and through the skies,
In never-wearied search of Paradise-
Region that crowns her beauty with the name
She bears for us-for us how blest,
How happy at all seasons, could like aim
Uphold our spirits urged to kindred flight

On wings that fear no glance of God's pure sight,
No tempest from His breath, their promised rest
Seeking with indefatigable quest

Above a world that deems itself most wise

When most enslaved by gross realities !"

An appalling pestilence raged in Carthage, and so gave deadly emphasis to the exhortations of St. Cyprian, when he, a good shepherd, sought to lead the sheep of his flock to green pastures and still waters of comfort; reminding them, as he stood between the living and the dead, while as yet the plague was stayed not, that they had renounced the world, and were abiding here as strangers and pilgrims only. “Let us," he besought them, "embrace that time which gives to each one his home, which, delivering us from this world, and loosing us from worldly snares, restores us to paradise and the kingdom." Who, he asks, that is placed in a foreign land, would not hasten to return to his own country? Who that saileth towards his own, would not eagerly desire a prosperous wind to bring him swiftly to the embrace of those he loves? "Our country we believe to be paradise: the patriarchs we esteem our parents. Why, then, do we not speed and run, that we may behold our country and salute our parents?"

Salutary though the sentiment be, however, it admits of onesided exaggeration. There are good people who, for instance, exalt and expatiate upon the death of godly infants, as though to quit this earth of ours at the very earliest date were the most blessed of privileges. The idea of man being sent into the world for any definite purpose never seems, it has been justly said, to enter the minds of these good people. "With them life is but an irksome omnibus-journey-the shorter the better-and to be got over by each without any regard to the comfort or requirements of his fellow-travellers." Only in part

are these strictures on

66

the shorter the better" applicable, if at all, to the theme and expression of Mrs. Browning's sonnet :

"I think we are too ready with complaint

In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope
Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope

Of yon grey blank of sky, we might grow faint
To muse upon eternity's constraint

Round our aspirant souls. But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop

For a few days consumed in loss and taint?
O pusillanimous heart! be comforted,

And, like a cheerful traveller, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints ?—At least it may be said,

'Because the way is short, I thank thee, God !'"

Addison devotes a paragraph in one of his Spectators to the fact of men being in Scripture called strangers and sojourners upon earth, and life a pilgrimage. And he refers to several heathen as well as Christian authors, who under the same kind of metaphor have represented the world as an inn, which was only designed to furnish us with accommodation in this our passage. It is therefore very absurd, urges our moral essayist, to think of setting up our rest before we come to our journey's end; and not rather to take care of the reception we shall there meet with, than to fix our thoughts on the little conveniences and advantages which we enjoy one above another in the way to it.

"The Illusiveness of Life" is the title of a sermon on the patriarchs as sojourners in a strange country, by the late F. W. Robertson, of Brighton; who with characteristic force and insight explains the deception of life's promise, and the meaning of that deception. He shows how our natural anticipations deceive us-every human life being a fresh one, bright with hopes that will never be realized. With our affections, he goes on to say, it is still worse, because they promise more. "Men's affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan-the tents of a night--not permanent habitations, even for this life."

Where, he asks, are the charms of character, the perfection and the purity and the truthfulness which seemed so resplendent in our friend? They were only the shape of our own conceptions -our creative shaping intellect projected its own fantasies on him; and hence we outgrow our early friendships—outgrow the intensity of all: we dwell in tents; we never find a home, even in the land of promise, any more than Abraham did. "Life is an unenjoyable Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it." But there is another beside the sentimental way, trite enough, of considering this aspect of life-as a bubble, a dream, a delusion, a phantasm, and that other is the way of faith. “The ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could feel the brokenness of life's promises: they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims here; they said that they had here no continuing city; but they did not mournfully moralize on this; they said it cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so." Strangers -the very term implies a distant home. Pilgrims-the law of whose pilgrimage is to make progress. Forgetting the things. behind; rating at their true worth the things around; earnestly pressing forward to the things before. Keble's devout lyric on the escape to Zoar is pitched in this key:

"Sweet is the smile of home; the mutual look

When hearts are of each other sure;

Sweet all the joys that crowd the household nook,
The haunt of all affections pure;

Yet in the world even these abide, and we

Above the world our calling boast:

Once gain the mountain-top, and thou art free:

Till then, who rest, presume; who turn to look, are lost."

THE FALSITY OF THE FAMILIAR FRIEND.

THE

PSALM xli. 9.

'HE psalmist's enemies were speaking evil of him: when should he die, and his name perish ? All that hated him were whispering together against him, and devising hurt.

But this he could bear, on the part of declared foes. What he could not bear was that his own familiar friend, in whom he trusted, and who ate of his bread, should have lifted up his heel against him.

Hengstenberg remarks that in Judas the expression, “Which did eat of my bread," receives its full, its frightful verification, in the fact of his participating in the Last Supper-to say nothing of habitually sharing in previous and everyday meals.

Even a comparatively slight wound may be severe when dealt by a friend. Dr. Colani thinks that never could the Son of man have felt so acutely the pain caused by opposition and non-recognition as when He received the message from John the Baptist, inquiring into the credentials of His Divine mission. That the rulers of the people, that one of the twelve, that those of His own kin, should doubt or dispute His mission, was hard enough to bear, but perhaps easy to foresee. But when he who had baptized Him, who had, so to speak, revealed Him to Himself,-when His "spiritual father" took his stand among the doubters, "Jesus must have felt a heartrending surprise, a veritable consternation:" for the Baptist was not a reed shaken with the wind, and yet, if the Divine hand rested on that support, what but a reed was it, to pierce, even while it gave way?

The Et tu, Brute! of dying Cæsar is a large utterance, hardly more deep in reproachful pathos than wide of application. The bitterness of its import, varying in intensity, has sufficed to choke bad men and good and indifferent,- -as a pang more sharp than all. What stung Jugurtha to the heart was the treachery of his confidential agent, Bomilcar, who intrigued to betray him to the Romans. What Cicero professes to have felt most keenly, during the Clodian troubles, was the perfidious conduct to him of that Serranus to whom, when consul, he had been so kind; nor was it the least bitter drop in the cup he had to drain at the last, that the leader of the band who took his life was one whose life Cicero had once saved, as counsel for the defence. Antony in the tragedy is naturally made to brood most resentfully on the being betrayed