we cannot here) withdraw our thoughts altogether from painful subjects. "If requisite for the fulfilment of their joy," says a writer on this subject, "GOD Himself, we may humbly presume, will providentially interpose and counteract, by some merciful agency of His own, any tendency to the diminution of the delight."

But are the views here advanced, borne out by Scripture? for to Scripture we must appeal on all questions of the unseen world. We think that they are.

Holy Job (in the well-known passage with which the Church directs her Priests to welcome home the departed,) anticipates the time when in his own restored flesh given back after worms have destroyed his body, he shall with his own eyes, for himself, and not another, behold his Redeemer; an evident intimation of identity, and of the faculty of recognition. And the same inference may be drawn from S. Paul's beautiful analogy of the germinating of plants to the resurrection: the body that shall be the lily in its splendour, surpassing a monarch's glory, (differ as it may in outward form) is yet identical with the bare grain originally sown; to every seed belongs its own body; yet it is not more identical than in that raised in glory and sown in corruption.

But we are not left to inferences: on the holy Mount of Transfiguration in the excellent glory, are seen Moses and Elias talking with JESUS. How would the disciples know them to be the lawgiver and the prophet? Probably by recognizing some traditional traces, or by the subject of their conversation; in either case continued personal identity and mutual recognition is established.

When David lost his child, his consolation evidently arose from the thought of a reunion: "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me." But what consolation is this, were mutual recognition impossible? Dives in

the narrative, (we see not why it should be called a parable,) addresses Abraham, by the common term of earthly relationship, Father Abraham; he sees and recognizes the neglected mendicant, and whatever change may have passed over him in the disembodied state, he is unchanged as far as recognition and recollection goes; he is so far from forgetting, that his anxious prayer is for his surviving relations, his five brethren; the soul in prison and the former associate are still one in memory, in feeling, in thought, and in prayers.

S. John declares it to be the peculiar blessedness of the sons of GOD that they shall be like the SAVIOUR. But was He above earthly friendships? Then what mean we when we read of the disciple whom JESUS loved, that JESUS loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus? This was no general love for believers, but individual love—friendship in fact. But did He divest Himself of these associations when He assumed the Resurrection Body? Not so, or why made He the thricetold appeal to Peter; and why singled He out after His Ascension, the disciple whom He loved, to show unto His servants things which must shortly come to pass ? If we then are to be like to our SAVIOUR CHRIST, we shall be like Him in this-that we shall remember and not forget our friends. Again, S. Paul consoles the Thessalonians, and bids them comfort one another with the thought, that "those who sleep in JESUS will GOD bring with Him," that the living who shall be on the earth at His coming, shall not prevent, i.e. go before them which are asleep; and then he adds, so shall we quick and dead be ever with the LORD. The conclusion from the Apostle's words seems to be, that the reason why they were to sorrow not as others which have no hope was, that they should meet, and be ever with (in

the presence of) the LORD, their own relatives, those whose eyes they had closed; by whose graves they had stood; their own dead.

To the same purport are many other of the great Apostle's declarations. He fires his converts with a noble Christian ambition, because of the cloud of witnesses by whom they are encompassed; and the irresistible inference is, that we shall see and recognize the worthies, whom he thus recounts. Now, if we shall see and recognize Patriarch and Prophets, Apostles and Martyrs, we shall see and recognize even the least in the kingdom of Heaven; and if so be our friends are there, we shall recognize them, for it is "the friends which we have made with the mammon of unrighteousness who are to welcome us into everlasting habitations." We read moreover, that Abraham was to be buried in a good old age, and to go to his fathers in peace. And "he was gathered to his people."

The perfected state is to be the perfection of all that is good in life; what then is more holy or more sacred than Christian friendship? If charity never faileth, friendship a constituent thereof shall not fail likewise.

We think then that there will be mutual recognition in the world beyond the grave; we believe that the instincts of men, the nature of the case, and Holy Scripture (both by inferences and express statements) warrant this belief; we ourselves should be sorry to lose the comfort of such an expectation; we have felt it in trying hours, we have seen it lighten the weight of sorrow, and remove the burden of grief when other thoughts failed; we would that our readers should feel it also.

O weeping mother! stand not by that broken pillar, as though the staff of thy hope, the stay of thy life were gone for ever, thou shalt go to him, but he shall not re

turn to thee. O afflicted father, deem not that thou hast seen the last of thy first-born, thy might, and the beginning of thy strength, "thou shalt go to him, but he shall not return to thee." O bereaved husband, the delight of whose eyes is taken away at a stroke, lay not up all that is precious of thy loved one in that cold urnthat heart shall beat again, thou shalt go to her, but she shall not return to thee; the grave is not oblivion; death is not, they contradicted nature who wrote it up that it is, death is not eternal sleep, if in thy sadness thou hast inscribed "integer vita" on thy scutcheon, non omnis moriar must be scored over it. O son of sorrow! forget not the womb that bore thee, nor the paps thou hast sucked; in Heaven shall stand together a mother and a son, the Incarnate Son of GOD, and her whom all generations have called "blessed;" forget not then thy earthly parent, she looked on thee in thy cradle, she shall see thee in glory, thou shalt go to her, but she shall not return to thee.

Oh, solitary mourner, walk not in the cypress shade, as though all thy future were clouded over, say not by the grave, here is the end of hope and love; spicey breezes, pure as Eden's, shall disperse the darkness and the mist; there is "sunlight in the cloud;" there is a meeting, where parting is unknown; there is a home where sounds and sights of mourning find no entrance; where the sable is exchanged for garments of light, the cypress for the palm, the cross for the crown.

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TALKS ABOUT MANY TOWNS; OR, ROSA'S SUMMER WANDERINGS.

CHAPTER XI.

THE following Monday noon found us somewhat impatiently awaiting the tardy appearance of an overdue train to Carlisle. We were fortunate in travelling in the same carriage with an elderly Clergyman and his daughter residing amid the mountains, who enlivened the ride with descriptions of some of the charming scenes we proposed visiting during the ensuing fortnight; especially advising us not to omit seeing Borrowdale and Langdale. Almost too speedily we reached Carlisle. On emerging from the station, the first objects that met our gaze were two red round towers, one on either side of the chief street: these we ascertained to be the new Court-houses, erected on the site of the ancient citadel. Thence we proceeded in search of the Cathedral, a sadly mutilated wreck, consisting only of a choir, (said to be the widest in England,) with two narrow side-aisles, and a transept. The nave was almost wholly destroyed by Oliver Cromwell, who sacrilegiously built stabling for his soldiery with the materials. The fragment of the nave yet remaining is walled off from the transept, and serves (as, the entire west end had formerly done) for a small parochial Church, bearing the name of S. Mary. Nor is this the solitary act of desecration this unhappy Cathedral has experienced the Duke of Cumberland, in a century less misguided by puritanic blindness, forgot the reverence due to the sanctity of GoD's temple; and prompted, it must have been, by the spirit of that profane utilitarianism so deplorably rampant in our own day, actually housed in the Cathedral some of his troops, or their horses, in 1745.