directed us to pray daily. The prevailing sickness ought to serve to prove men's dispositions, whether the healthy will take care of the sick; whether masters will show sympathy to their sick servants."

In what light Christians regarded these misfortunes, and how they distinguished themselves from the heathen, we may learn from a beautiful circular epistle which Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, a contemporary of Cyprian, wrote on such an occasion to the Egyptian churches. The persecution of the Christians under the Emperor Valerian, and after his death a civil war, occurred first; then followed a desolating pestilence. At this time Dionysius invited the Egyptian churches to the celebration of Easter in the following manner: "To other men the present may appear an unsuitable time for the celebration of a festival. But they cannot celebrate a true festival, either now or at any other time; not in a mournful time, nor yet in a joyful one, as would appear to them most suitable for a feast; [he means to say, that the ground of true festive joy cannot be given by earthly, but only by heavenly good; this joy cannot be imparted to those who are yet oppressed by the burden of their sins;] for now all is mournful. Nothing but complaints are heard in the city on account of the multitude of the dead, and of more who die daily. What happened previously was also very terrible. First of all, they persecuted us; and although we alone were persecuted and put to death, we celebrated even at that time our festival. Every place of suffering became to us a place of festive gathering, the open country, the desert, the ship, the tavern, the prison; and the perfected martyrs could celebrate the most glorious festival, who had been admitted to the festivities of heaven. After that came war and hunger, which we were obliged to bear along with the heathen. Then we were obliged to bear alone the sufferings which they inflicted upon us, yet they must also experience the sufferings which they inflicted on one another; and moreover we enjoy the peace of Christ which he has granted to us alone. Now, after we and they had been allowed to take breath for only a very short time, that epidemic broke out, most fearful and terrible for the heathen, but for us a peculiar exercise and trial of our faith. Very many of our brethren who, from their great love for their neighbours and brethren, spared not themselves

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many, every one of whom cared for the rest, visited the sick without regard to consequences, continually attended them, and served them for Christ's sake, and joyfully gave up their lives with them. Many who had recovered others by their care, died in their stead. In this way the best of our brethren, some presbyters and deacons, and approved persons among the laity, departed this life; so that this kind of death, which proceeded from the greatest piety and the strongest faith, seemed not inferior to martyrdom. And those who closed the eyes and mouths of dying Christians, who carried them away on their shoulders, embraced them, washed them and placed them in their shroud, soon afterwards shared the same fate. The heathen acted quite differently. They turned away those who fell ill; they shunned their dearest friends, or threw them half dead into the streets; for they dreaded the spread of death, which, with all their efforts, they could not easily avoid."

A man whose feelings are not sanctified and enlightened by the divine life, who lives in the world without any certain hope of the future, is either disposed to give way altogether to the irregular outburst of excessive natural feeling on the death of dear friends and relations, as we find among rude nations; or if he suppresses the natural feelings of humanity, he falls into the worse extreme of a cold insensibility, whether it proceeds from his natural temperament or is the product of a false philosophy. But Christianity does not say to a man, Love and friendship, like everything connected with individual personality, are transitory earthly appearances, only passing phenomena, rays of light breaking into time, which flow back to their original fountain in eternity;' it does not require from man the surrender of his individual existence with a cold resignation to a lifeless, unfeeling idea of the universe which can warm no human heart, which is nothing but a self-created idol of a perverted reason that mistakes realities for shadows, and shadows for realities. It does not require man to sacrifice to a Saturn who devours his own children, but to a loving heavenly Father, who restores what is sacrificed in a glorified, higher life; it demands a surrender to be again restored, to rise from the grave to a new glorious life in a transformed personality through a Redeemer who has conquered death. Those spirits. Christianity asserts, who

meet one another in transitory coverings, and know and love one another in the mysterious reflection of their inner life, will know and love one another far more intimately when they recognize one another in God's presence, where they shall know as they will be known; when they will recognize one another as glorified beings in a new world of glory, where God shall wipe away all tears, and there shall be no more death, and no more night, and they shall need no lamp nor light of the sun, but God the Lord shall be their light. When that which is in part is succeeded by the perfect, when faith shall be changed into sight, love will increase in proportion as it approaches nearer the original source of all love, even God, who is love. We shall become," says Tertullian, "so much more intimately united to one another, because we are destined for a better state, we shall rise again to a spiritual communion; there will be a mutual recognition. How could we sing eternal praises to God, unless we retained the feeling and the remembrance of what we owe to him? if we do not in our glorified state retain our self-consciousness? We who will be with God, will also be one with one another, since we shall be all one in God."

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Christianity, therefore, by no means suppresses the feelings of sorrow natural to human nature in our separation from those who have been snatched away from our visible intercourse; but it mitigates and moderates these feelings by the altered view of death (which is now to be regarded as a sleep from which man will awake to a glorified existence, as the birth-day of a higher life), by the confident hope it inspires of a reunion in the assembly of the perfect, and by a child-like resignation to the unsearchable wisdom of the heavenly Father, who makes all things work together for the good of his people. Cyprian often said to his church in his sermons, especially during the prevailing epidemic: "You must not mourn for those who are released from the world by the call of the Lord, when you know they are not lost, but sent before, that they may go before those who are left behind, as travellers or voyagers; we must, indeed, long after them, but not bewail them; we ought not, for their sakes, to put on black garments, since there they are already clothed in white. We must not give the heathen an opportunity justly to blame Christians by sorrowing for those whom they speak of as

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living with God, as if they were lost and perished men, and thus not acknowledging as true by the witness of the heart, what they confess outwardly in words." "We betray our hope and our faith; all that we say appears to be artificial and hypocritical.”

The affectionate remembrance of the departed was not suppressed or weakened by Christianity, but rather heightened, reanimated, and rendered more cordial. Communion with the living and the dead was, in truth, a communion in the Lord, a communion for eternity, the bond of which, resting in the Eternal, could be sundered by no power of death or hell. Christians have a consciousness of constant invisible communion with those from whom they are outwardly separated. In prayer, by which the Christian feels himself connected with the whole holy assembly of blessed spirits to which he belongs, he thinks especially of those dear friends who have joined it before him. These feelings in the primitive age were especially indulged on the anniversary of their death, or rather their birth-day for eternal life. They partook on these days of the Lord's body, with the lively consciousness that they were joined in communion with the Lord, and with their dear friends, his members; they made particular mention of those who had died in communion with the Lord in the church prayers at the celebration of the Supper. In the same way the death-day of the martyrs was celebrated by the whole church. The church assembled at their graves, and partook of the Holy Supper in the living consciousness of indissoluble communion with the Lord and his people; they prayed for the martyrs, who had been like themselves sinful men, and could only find salvation in the grace of the Redeemer.

The Christians also evinced their tender love to the remains of the deceased, which did not appear to them as impure, as a corpse always appears impure to the Jews and heathen, and by the latter was regarded as carrying with it a bad omen. The Christian knew only one thing to be dead and impure, that is, sin, by which man is separated from the source of all true life; only from this impurity it was needful that man should purify himself by faith in the Redeemer, who suffered and died for him (by the inward sprinkling of the heart with the blood of Jesus, as it is described in the Epistle to the

Hebrews); he was bound to give himself continually to the new life, and to regret all that was dead; since both soul and body were destined to be living, pure and sanctified as the organ of a holy, all-penetrating higher life. Thus Christians regarded the remains of their brethren with peculiar love and care, as the organs formerly animated by a sanctified soul, temples of the Holy Spirit, which would hereafter be again animated as the glorified organs of glorified souls.

The fanaticism of the heathen wished to deprive the Christians of the precious remains of their martyrs, as they said at the martyrdom of Polycarp, when they hesitated to give his ashes to his friends, "lest they should leave the crucified One, and worship him instead.' When the Christians were

told of this, they replied, that the heathen "know not that we can never forsake Christ, who suffered for the salvation of those who are saved in all the world, nor can we reverence any other; for we adore him, being the Son of God; but the martyrs we worthily love on account of their unconquerable obedience to their own king and teacher, of whom may we be joint-partakers and fellow-disciples." The church said further, in their account of his martyrdom: "At last, taking his bones, more valued than precious stones, and esteemed above gold, we deposited them in a suitable place. There, if possible, assembling in joy and gladness, the Lord will grant us to celebrate the birth-day of his martyrdom, in memory of those who have endured past conflicts, and as an exercise and preparation for those that are to come after them."

We see, from these examples, how far they were at that time from over-valuing the vessels of divine grace. But such an over-valuation is an error into which man easily falls. He easily transfers the honour which is due to the Lord alone to the frail vessel which the Lord has made use of for his own glory. We have already noticed the dangers that threatened from this quarter. Tertullian felt himself obliged to protest against the excessive veneration of confessors and martyrs which was gaining ground in his times, when some who had been excommunicated for their vicious practices set too great a value on the absolution granted by the confessors, to whom they resorted in the mines or the prisons. Against the claims of such confessors he says: "Who is there without sin, as long as he lives on earth and in the flesh? Whoever is a martyr,