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on to the porch, I kept pondering on them with a sort of amazed joy. I followed the mourners into the church. The Psalms rather recalled my thoughts of death and broke the new current of my thoughts, though I felt their fitness as impressing upon the living the shortness of life and the certainty of death. I had been meditating so bitterly of death, that at that moment they rather deepened my gloom; but when the clergyman with great feeling read the sublime chapter of St. Paul touching the resurrection, my whole frame thrilled with strange sensations of awe and hope and joy. The world seemed to swim before my eyes as a poor fading dream; a new thirst for this promised immortality seized me; worldly things melted into utter insignificance before the prospect which the Apostle, speaking by the Spirit, opened out to my kindling soul; and when the clergyman, himself warmed with the increasing sublimity of the triumphant words, exclaimed, "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" unconscious of all around me I threw myself on the ground, and wept in an ecstacy of awakened hope.

JOHN HENRY PARKER, OXFORD AND LONDON.

Tracts for the Christian Seasons.

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TUESDAY IN EASTER WEEK.

Life.

AGAIN the funeral was on its road. The corpse was carried out of the church where the hearts of the mourners had been strengthened by the words of St. Paul, for the last bitter act of all, the giving of dust to dust. Again my soul was cheered by other words of the Spirit that took away the bitterness of death, and represented it as gain to die, as gain to give our dust to dust, as gain to be taken from our accustomed place on earth, as gain to leave earthly home and kindred, supposing that our life has been a holy and Christian life, ending with a holy and Christian death. My spirit was stirred within me when after the earth, thrice cast, had sounded upon the coffin, the Service supplied the mourners with instant consolation; "I heard a voice from heaven," was the consoling sentence touchingly and solemnly delivered," saying unto me,

Write, from henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: even so saith the Spirit; for they rest from their labours." The remainder of the Service spoke in like strains of hope; and while my own heart was inexpressibly lightened by the forcible and feeling assertion of the truth of the resurrection, and of our hope in Christ, I could not but feel how much of divine consolation was poured into the souls of that sad group of mourners, standing round the grave of their friend almost overcome with grief.

The procession soon passed on; a little lingering there was at the grave; a little looking in, ere the earth was cast over the coffin; a little trembling pause as the tearful eyes gazed on that which might not be disturbed till the day of resurrection, and then the mourners moved towards home. Then the grave-digger shovelled the earth into the grave, and I was left alone.

Again seating myself on the old tomb, my mind now wandered from the former subject of death to that of life, of resurrection to eternal life. The scenes that I had so lately witnessed, and that had filled me with profound melancholy, now stood before me in a very different light. The grief of the surgeon's widow, of the old man's

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grand-daughter, of the father of the little child, now reminded me of the text, "they that sow in tears shall reap in joy;" and I pictured to myself the rapture, the transport of all those afflicted ones, when the wife should be restored again to her husband, the little girl stand at the side. of the silver-haired old man, and the father join his little one, never to be parted any more. death!" I said to myself, "where is thy sting!" a sting indeed it has even yet, but it is a broken, blunted sting; the sharpest of its pangs is done away by Him who has given us hope, and now we can lay husband or child or father in the grave with a good hope of beholding them in. the land of life, even of eternal life, by the power of His resurrection who is a "quickening Spirit." The flesh is as grass, and the scythe of death in the hand of Time cuts us down, but as the flower of grass so shall we rise again; the lanes, the fields, the gardens that brighten our earthly homes, all shew us the resurrection of the dead; men will have their spring, when the dead seed of their mortal bodies shall be quickened by the voice of God. The words of the Apostle that I had so lately heard in church rose afresh to my mind as I gazed on the daisies that speckled the turf of the church

yard with their little milk-white stars. "That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die; and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him, and to every seed his own body."

Thus the scythe of death seemed to inflict but a friendly wound, letting out the soul of the faithful from its walls of flesh to fly into the blessed fields of paradise, amongst the departed spirits of the just, and also releasing the body from all pain and torment and woe, from hunger and thirst, from cold and weariness, from weakness and disease, to lie in peace till it should be re-united to the soul in the glorious kingdom of our Lord.

While such reflections were passing in my mind, the bells of the church struck up, and I found that, according to the Prayer-book, Easter joy was prolonged in this place beyond Easter Sunday. Several of the parishioners were wending their way to the House of Prayer. I entered with the rest, and with no little thankfulness I took my seat with the little village flock, that had left their homes to pray to their risen Lord. The same aged clergyman performed the service,

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