How

its marvellous brightness, its crystalline humour, its perfect lens, its delicate network of nerves, its power of reflecting on so tiny a mirror such heavens of starry infinitude, such an immense magnificence of varied light. Or take the human heart. Think of its unapproachable force and delicacy as an engine of life; think how at each second of its systole and diastole we feel the "thrill, the leap, the gladness of our pulses flowing free." That heart-beat floods each limb with a vigour which is perpetually renovated, and never ceases until death. unmistakably does this mortal body of ours— this harp of a thousand strings-ring out the name of its Creator whose hand could alone have framed it to answer to His divine idea. And yet our body is not ourselves. In the great tragedy the brooding and melancholy prince does not sign his letter with the name "Hamlet," but with the words, "The machine which is to me Hamlet;" implying that his body is only something which enables him to be conscious of himself something in which his true being is

shrouded—something out of which the soul does but look through the open eyes. The body indeed may lie there perfect and uninjured; the face not repulsive, but beautiful and grave and sweet; every line of the mortal frame delicate and perfect as the lines of a statue; but if life be gone-if that be not sleep, but the beauty of Death his brother-then the fair form is not a human being, but is only a mask of clay. "That is not my mother," was the pathetic utterance of a little child, led in to gaze on the bed where his dead mother lay. No: the body is not ourselves; for indeed even the natural life is not ourselves. Physically, mentally, morally we may outlive ourselves before we go to our long home. With what awful truth and force does the American poet describe the death of that which is best within us the death before death :

"So fallen! so lost! The light withdrawn
Which once he wore!

The glory from the grey hairs gone

For evermore !

"All else is gone: from those great eyes
The soul has fled;

When faith is lost, when honour dies,

The man is dead!"

But apart from this moral death which befalls some men, all of us after a few short years are greeted by what St. Francis of Assisi calls “our sister, the death of the body." Within a few short years, perishing far sooner than the dead things around us, we shall be buried under the sod. If thousands of the human race live only for their bodies-care for nothing so much as they care for their bodily needs--are proud of nothing so much as of their bodily endowments-how is their folly reproached by that which so soon is all that is left of us on earth--the green mound and the crumbling dust! "And the voice said, Cry. What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as a flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever."

CHAPTER II.

BUT if "I am

I AM (continued).

"" means far more than "I am a living body," what does it mean?

All nations above the lowest have felt that it involves the existence of some inward principle, some life which is not of the flesh, something which is the source of emotions and aspirations and desires. An ancient philosopher tried to make a symbol of the nature of man. Imagine, he said, a lion, a manyheaded monster, and a man living in one cell, and you have a symbol of our inward life. The lion represents the angry, the impulsive, the passionate element within us; the many-headed monster represents the lusts and appetites; the man represents the reason. If the monster have the upper hand, we are the slaves of passion, the victims of a foul and aded tyranny. If the lion reign in our

moral being we are violent and furious.

Our

only true happiness is when the man holds the lion by a chain, and puts his foot upon the monster's neck; in other words, when our reason controls our anger, and when reason and indignation together crush our evil passions under their feet.

The allegory is a true and instructive one; but we for whom Christ has lived and died, we on whom God has shed forth the light of his Holy Spirit, may see yet further into the mystery of our being than this. We know that our mortal body is the seat of many carnal desires to which the Scripture gives the name of" the lusts of the flesh;" but that while these are to be subdued and mortified, the body itself is to be reverenced. It is neither to be exalted into the prime object of life as is the case among savage races; nor degraded by vile affections as it too often was by the Gentile world of antiquity; nor to be deformed and tortured with needless and torturing asceticism as it was by the monks and hermits, and by