The stanza on which we are commenting is most frequently written at the close of school, about the opening of the spring season, when the "grass is green," and the bud of the "red rose" begins to swell. Strange as it may seem to those who seek for the reason of things on the surface, it has long since been observed that the instincts of immortality are strongest in spring-time. They awaken with the revival of nature. It is, moreover, at this season of the year that the soul is most moved by mystic longings. This explains why Solomon, in the Song of Songs, connects with the coming of spring the singing of birds, the blooming of flowers, the inward voice which invites: Arise my love, my fair one, and come away!" We would suppose this the very time when the heart would most desire to remain, and would feel itself most sweetly at home on earth. But it is not so. It is amid the bloom and beauty of spring that the spirit feels itself most strongly drawn upon by the powers of the infinite. An undefined hope sings in the bosom of youth a song which accords with the prophetic cooings of the dove, waking the same memories and inspiring the same hopes.

Under the influence of these mysterious feelings the youth writes the stanza which we have quoted. How important that this strange seriousness should receive the proper direction! These mystic feelings are no doubt deep yearnings after Christ, as they are after an hereafter. They are a feeling in the dark after the true rest of the soul. a warmth and a light slumbering in the embers; a

"Moving about in worlds not realized,

High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised!
Those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a mystic light of all our seeing;

Uphold us-cherish—and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal silence; truths that wake

To perish never:

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor man, nor boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither

And see the children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

They are

The stanza we have quoted, though serious, has still a great deal of hope in it. It belongs, as we have said, to dawning youth. Sometimes, however, the same sentiment is expressed in a more gloomy style:

"When I am dead and in my grave,

And all my bones are rotten,
This little verse will show my name
When I am quite forgotten."

This evidently belongs to a later period in youth. It shows that some disappointments have darkened life; hope is no more so spontaneous and firm as it once was, and the heart feels that "there has passed away a glory from earth." There is not so implicit a faith in the perpetuity of friendship. The writer believes that he shall be "quite forgotten" except as this "little verse" shall call him to the mind and memory of his companions. This verse does not please us. It is too cheerless. It sounds even morbid. We fear that the heart of the youth who writes it is not lighted up by the hopes of religion as it ought to be. It seems so much like the sorrow of the world which worketh death.

There is another form in which this same gloomy sentiment is sometimes expressed. Thus:

"When this you see,

Remember me,

Lest I should be forgotten,

When I am dead,

And in my grave,

And all my bones are rotten."

Again we say, we would rather see something more cheerful. Religion is serious, but not gloomy. This stanza seems to us too much like a rose that has a worm at its heart. It has a fragrance, but it is too languid to be breathed from a healthy heart. We would say to such a one, pray for a little more cheerful faith. With that which has more hope in it. It is this that gives freshness and vigor to the heart, and makes youth the happy preparatory stage to a pious, brave, and useful life.

In short, what we recommend is something of the spirit which breathes in another stanza which we find in school books. Thus:

"Wilson Langdon is my name,
Farming is my station:
Iowa is my dwelling place,

And Christ is my salvation."

There is nerve, and faith, and purpose in this! He takes right hold of his secular calling in the hope and spirit of religion. Here is no languid, morbid dreaming about "rotten bones" and being "forgotten." Here is the power which brings resurrection. He has chosen an honorable vocation. He is determined to be a christian farmer; and yet he does not propose to follow this business as an end, only as a means, of life. He intends to be diligent in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. While his hands rest on the plough, his heart shall rest on Christ as "his salvation." We venture to say that this is just what all young men should learn at school; and this is the spirit in which they should step from the school into the business of life.

THE SCRIPTURES ALWAYS FRESH.-Can this be said of any other book? The venerable Dr. Woods, in addressing the students at Andover, said that when he commenced his duties as Professor of Theology, he feared that the frequency with which he should have to pass over the same portions of Scripture, would abate the interest in his own mind in reading them; but, after more than fifty years of study, it was his experience that with every class his interest increased.

ASCENSION DAY.

BY J. W. NEVIN, D. D.

THE triumph of our Saviour's resurrection drew after it, with necessary consequence, his exaltation at the right hand of God. Having risen from the grave, the conqueror of death and hell, he could not fail to enter into his glory, and to become thus head over all things, in a real way, to his church. The Festival of Easter completes itself in the Festival of the Ascension; as this again opens the way immediately for the Festival of Pentecost. In one view the whole period may be regarded as a single solemnity. The Resurrection finds its proper conclusion, reaches its full significance for the world, only in the coming of the Holy Ghost. This was the great promise of the gospel. All looked to this from the beginning. Christ died that he might rise again; rose again that he might ascend up far above all heavens; ascended up that he might fill all things, and make his power and grace known by the mission of his Spirit.

Thus in the Creed these glorious mysteries are joined together, as inseparable parts of a single whole, or as different stages merely in the progress of one and the same grand fact. To believe one, we must believe all. As something real, and not simply notional and imaginary, each article is conditioned absolutely by the place it holds in connection with the rest. In this way we are furnished with a single and easy test, by which to try how far any part of the Creed is received and held by us with true faith. All depends on the sense we have of its necessary connection with what goes before, and with what follows after. To acknowledge the existence of Christ, without allowing at the same time the full force of the clause, "conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary," would be at once a contradiction, showing that the true mystery of his presence in the world was not really perceived or acknowledged at all. It would be to substitute a mere natural conception or fancy of our own mind for the actual supernatural fact which faith in this case is required to embrace. Equally fatal to any confession of Christ would it be, not to make earnest with the fact of his death, with his descent to hades, and with his resurrection from the dead. And just so again, we cannot really believe in his resurrection without going on to say: "He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead." Nor can our faith stop there; but with the actual progress of the Saviour's life and power, must take in also the revelation of Pentecost, with all its consequent blessings for our fallen race, onward to his second coming. No one can truly believe in Christ's glorification at the right hand of God, who is not prepared to add with the Creed: "I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting."

Two opposite suppositions may be made in regard to our Saviour's resurrection, which are equally at war with all true faith in the historical reality of the fact. One, that it was a return simply to the order of existence he possessed before, a restoration of the common human life which he gave up on the cross. The other, that it involved such a change of existence as fairly brought to an end his previous human life, taking it out of all historical connection with the world, and resolving it altogether into spirit, or rather into a mere object of thought. Both of these conceptions destroy the realness of what Christ was and still is; and make it impossible to believe in him, with the faith which is required by the Creed. The first overthrows the supernatural side of his being, sinks him down to the order of mere nature, makes him to be in truth no more than a common man. The second nullifies his being just as fully on the opposite side; makes his revelation in the flesh a mere temporary appearance or show; converts his whole person at last into a gnostic imagination.

With wonderful effect, the resurrection state of Christ is so represented in the New Testament as to avoid each extreme; and for any one who is prepared to consider the matter properly, the fact that it has done so cannot fail to be felt as one of the strongest arguments for the reality of the mystery itself and for the inspiration of the record in which it is described. We cannot easily conceive indeed of a representation of character and life more difficult to produce, than that which is brought before us, under this view, in the close of the evangelical history. No mere art or skill of man can be considered equal to its successful invention. In the New Testament, however, the conditions and requirements of the problem are met, on all sides, and fully satisfied. Christ is exhibited to us as a risen Saviour, in a form which does no violence to the conception in any direction, but is felt to be in the most simple and perfect harmony with it throughout. All is answerable to the character and state described.

His re-appearance is no coming back properly to the life in which he had been known among men before. This was felt by his disciples, in every case in which he offered himself to their view; and we are made to feel it just as sensibly, through the same scenes and occasions, as they are described to us on the sacred page. They felt, and we are made to feel too, in every case, that with all the evidences they had of the realness of their Master's presence, he was still not with them and among them just as he had been before. There he was, speaking with them and making himself palpable to their senses in every way; and yet it was plain that he had in fact passed into another order of existence. They were not, after all, in the same world with him. He was with regard to them on the other side of death; and a strange unearthliness was made to invest his being, to their apprehension, at every point.

On the other hand, however, the representation is just as successful in setting before us the fact of a real resurrection of Christ from the dead, in distinction from every sort of gnostic phantom or dream. The disciples knew that the re-appearance of their Master was no mere apparition. And we too are made to feel this in seriously reading the narrative of the New Testament. He comes before us as one not of this mortal life, but as being still in his whole person the real continua

tion of what he was before. He is on the other side of death, not as a vision only; but in the form of a new higher existence, most real and substantial, in which the whole power of death has been surmounted and brought to an end: "I am the Resurrection and the Life! I am he that liveth and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death!"

These appearances of Christ after his resurrection were themselves, at the same time, a preparation only for his full and final transition over into that state, in which his new life was to be advanced to its full perfection and glory, and clothed with its proper lasting power for the salvation of the world. Without being able to understand or explain all the purposes of that "period of forty days," during which he continued to show himself to his disciples previously to his being taken up into heaven, we may easily enough see that it was in its very nature a temporary condition, that served merely to open the way for what was to follow. That was not the true permanent form of Christ's resurrection life. Its meaning and force lay in the fact of its soon afterwards passing over into something far more glorious; just as the morning twilight finds its proper significance only in being taken up by the full light of day. Without this movement on to its own proper consummation, however real it might have seemed for the moment, it must have come to bear in the end a more or less unreal and shadowy character, by no means answerable to the true historical conception of our Saviour's person. By the mystery of the Ascension, all is brought into right place and order. The lower manifestation of Christ's resurrection life, with its glimpses of spiritual power and glory, demonstrated to his disciples "by many infallible signs," in the sphere of their worldly experience and observation, gives way with natural course to the higher manifestation of the same life in the sphere of the Spirit. We retain our hold upon the historical realness of Christ's person, our sense of actual continuance in his life under a worthy and suitable form, only as we are enabled to follow him into the heavens, and have power to believe at the same time that he reigns there head over all things to the Church, and true also to his own promise: "Lo, I am with you always, to the end of the world."

Such being the force of the Ascension itself, as an article of the Christian Creed, we may see how necessary and important it is for us to cherish a proper regard for the season by which it is commemorated in the progress of the Church Year. It was from no fanciful conceit merely, that the Church ordained, from the earliest times, the great festivals which mark in this way the history of redemption from the birth of Christ onward to the pouring out of the Holy Ghost. The whole order rests upon a deep principle in the religious nature of man, which makes it certain that it can never be disregarded without serious damage and loss for the interests of piety. Want of regard for these holy seasons, necessarily implies a corresponding want of full beliving sympathy with the historical reality of the great facts they commemorate. The habit of religiously keeping them in mind, on the other hand, has a direct tendency to keep in us a lively sense of the facts as facts, and thus to clothe them with their proper power for our consciences and hearts. We think it not too much to say, without pretending to go any