at least for awhile, like a galling fetter upon the active mind and the eager will. But God tempers His weapons in His own way, and all to the best effect; and presently the busiest and most versatile intellect finds new depths and fresh possibilities of interest in the things that lie closest at home; the widest and the warmest heart learns that faltering feet and feeble hands cannot restrain love's farthest and highest flight; and as for God, with all that is involved in the soul's upward strain towards communion, and His descent of help, He may easily be nearer to the silence of an enforced quietness, than to the noise and press of men's common life. And so it often happens that, under circumstances like these, a character is built up which, if it necessarily shine upon but a few lives, shines for them with a brightness all the purer and more intense. Such virtue is not the beacon flame upon the hill-top, wakening half the land to heroic courage and stern endurance, but the quiet lamp which giveth light to all that are in the house, for sweet patience, and fine courtesy, and the practice of all homely goodness.

Such a life, withdrawn as it is from common temptations, is not without trials and difficulties peculiarly its own; but of these it is not needful now to speak. It is more to my purpose to point out that it is susceptible of a singular symmetry and completeness. The very narrowness which has been imposed upon it by God, and which we are so ready to regard as a privation, is only in another shape the restriction upon the indefiniteness of duty which many dutiful souls so passionately desire. For the claims upon an energetic nature are so many, so various, often so conflicting; it is so hard to know which of two competing duties ought to take precedence, so impossible to adjust effort at precisely its right intensity, and to hit the mean between base self-saving and foolish self-squandering,—that I think it must be a common wish for keen consciences to have the boundaries of industry a little more plainly marked out by God, and to be relieved from the perpetual perplexity of choice. If only one had but a fixed and limited place to fill! If only one could always clearly distinguish between what one ought to do, and what it would be wrong and foolish to attempt! And therefore, in this sense, God's prison may be the soul's liberty, and no round of duty so cheerfully and completely trodden as one which we, who are burthened with too large a capacity of flight, think sadly and hopelessly circumscribed. Then, so God has willed it, Quietness and Pain are sister angels, that have a singular privilege of access to Him; and the soul to which they minister, through the weary hours of the day and in the long watches of the night, may frequently mount upon their friendly wings into the sanctuary of His Presence, bringing with it, upon its return earthward, one knows not what glow caught from the infinite and eternal Brightness. The difficulties of a busy life are apt to throw mind and heart back upon themselves; the necessities of a quiet life have in them this fine quality, that they directly lead mind and heart to God. So ripen, slowly as the seasons pass and the years come and go, that sweetness and roundness of character which we call saintliness; and as we come in from our worldly work and struggle, with its soil still clinging to us, and the joy of achievement always dashed with the recollection of failure, we wonder at a goodness in which we can hardly detect a flaw, and upon which already rests a foregleam of the presence of God.

For one secret source of the influence which such a life may exercise, undoubtedly lies in its contrast to men's common and more active existence. I have just indicated one element of that contrast; the completeness with which a