spirit of the Christian parent? The good man's prayers were richly answered in his daughter's character and life, and in the hearts of all who read her pious, pure, and finely-toned hymns. One song alone of hers forbids a doubt of this

Jesus, my Lord, in Thy dear name unite,

All things my heart calls great, or good, or sweet;
Divinest springs of wonder and delight,

In Thee, Thou fairest of ten thousand, meet.

Do I not love Thee? ah, my conscious heart
Nor boldly dares affirm, nor can deny;
Oh, bid these clouds of gloomy fear depart,
With one bright ray from Thy propitious eye!

Do I not love Thee? can I then allow
Within my breast pretenders to Thy throne?
Oh, take my homage, at Thy feet I bow!
No other Lord my heart desires to own.

Take, take my passions in Thy sovereign hand,
Refine and mould them with Almighty skill;
Then shall I love the voice of Thy command,
And all my powers rejoice to do Thy will.

Thy love inspires the active sons of light,

With swift-wing'd zeal they wait upon Thy word;
Oh, let that love, in these abodes of night,

Bid my heart glow to serve my dearest Lord.

Come, love Divine, my languid wishes raise!
With heavenly zeal this faint cold heart inflame,
To join with angels in my Saviour's praise,
Like them obey His will, adore His name.

But can the mind, with heavy clay opprest,
To emulate seraphic ardour rise?
While sin pollutes her joys, forbids her rest,
How can she join the worship of the skies?

Yet He commands to love and to obey,
Whose hand sustains those happy spirits there;
In Him, my soul, who is thy Guide, thy Stay,
In Him confide, to Him commit thy care.

Jesus, my Lord, oh give me strength divine!
Then shall my powers in glad obedience move;
Receive the heart that wishes to be Thine,

And teach, oh teach me to obey and love!

This is one of the hymns from the volume on which the fond father invoked a blessing-a volume of hymns and poems by "Theodosia." And who and what Theodosia was is happily revealed in one of her letters to her "honoured father:"-" As many of these verses have been favoured with your approbation, I have now at your desire collected them into a little book, which I beg leave to present to you as a humble acknowledgment of my grateful sense of your parental affection, and the benefit I have received from your instructions. If you should survive me, it will, I doubt not, be preserved by you (however inconsiderable its real value) as a mournfully pleasing remem brance of a departed child who once shared your tender regard. If you think they are capable of affording pleasure or profit, you may, if you please, communicate any of them to friends or fellow-Christians. They may, perhaps, find seasons when the thoughts of the unworthy writer may suit their own, and the resemblance produce delight. If while I am sleeping in the silent grave my thoughts are of any real benefit to the meanest of the servants of my God, be the praise ascribed to the Almighty Giver of all grace. May the blessed hope of eternal life cheer my soul amidst the pangs of dissolution! May the blissful smiles of my Redeemer illuminate the gloomy shades of death, and point out my passage to the mansions of eternal day; that Ι may be able to say, in the full evidence of faith and hope, I am going to 'be ever with the Lord.' Then shall my God be glorified, and my dear relatives comforted in my death. May the Almighty long preserve your valuable life, and continue to make you a blessing to your family, a useful instructor to the people under your care, and an ornament to religion, is the ardent wish and prayer of, dear and honoured father, your ever dutiful and grateful daughter, "ANNE STEELE."

CHAPTER IV.

HYMNS OF THE FATHERS.

"Our holy and beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee."

WHO, in his dreams of the past, has not sometimes found himself floating across the Mediterranean down to ancient Egypt, and there moving, as none but spirits can move, along the face of those venerable and mysterious deposits of the Delta over which Egyptian, Ethiopian, Assyrian, Persian, Roman, and Saracen, in successive generations, have passed before him? and whose imagination has not wandered up the Nile in quiet visionary fashion, now under the shadow of African palms, and now through lily banks by the side of gliding pelicans, and within sight of the giraffe and the gazelle freely rambling on the desert sands? Who has not in his dreams looked at the calcareous cliffs from which the generations of the Old World dug their lime? or at the sandstone quarries which supplied slabs and blocks for the temples that had fallen into ruin long before England began her course? or at the awful granite piles from whence came the materials for those gigantic sculptures which still overawe mankind? or at the wilderness of ruins and sepulchres which, with their myriads of mummy forms, give to our hearts such lessons on human life? Who has not wandered there thinking of Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and his brethren, Jacob worshipping on his staff, his embalmment, and his funeral; and then of another Joseph and Mary, and the Holy Child; and then of the first Christian disciples, and their first flight to the desert? Our dreamy flights have sometimes led us from Egypt across the Red Sea to the base of Mount Colzim,

just where its bend looks out through the desert pass of Mount Kallil towards the plain of Baccarah, there to look at a few palms, sustained by three brackish springs, with a little garden of potherbs, onions, and dourah; and to find a human form seated at the entrance of a recess, dressed in wash-leather, with a sallow face expressive of quiet earnestness and high purpose, the lustrous depth of his upturned eye revealing the joy of his communion with heaven; the man who might be called the father of that recluse life which, though springing from perverted Christian principle, yet for so many ages swayed the movements of the Christian world, and gave out the precious strearus of hymns and songs which helped to preserve the spiritual life of a cloistered church. Then, have there not been visions of old Alexandria? visions which, like dissolving views, have changed from brilliant palaces to libraries and lecture-halls, from close retired streets to old basilicas, from students' cells to crowded places filled with multitudes struggling and heaving amidst the processes of transition from old heathenism to a half-formed Christianity; and then our visionary path has been crossed by the shadows of such men as Clement, and Origen, and Didymus, and their trains of disciples who peopled the first Christian schools of Alexandria. One would like to arrest the shade of Clement, and ask him to give us a few more hymns, or to sing to us some of the fragments that we have caught up from the ruins of his music-school, and to sing them as he and his scholars used to sing them both at home and in the church. It is difficult to catch even a dreamy outline of Clement's person and life; he has left a few touches of his own character. At the end of the second century, Alexandria was like a great centre of telegraphic communication, mysteriously linking itself with all the outstanding points in the world of thought.

In and around that centre many were running to and fro asking and answering questions, and voices from all nations were mingling in deep-toned inquiries after the supreme good. There, in the midst, was Clement, anxiously looking hither and thither, always intensely hungering and thirsting after truth. Now, he took lessons from the retreats of Lebanon, now from Assyria, and now from the Hebrew school of Tiberias. It was a weary search; but perfect sincerity is

always honoured from above, and is sure of its goal. His heart found rest at last; where his heart rested, there the wants of his intellect were supplied. He says enough about himself and Christianity to prove that he had found the secret of Christian life, and that he had been “transformed by the renewing of his mind." Still, his long in and out and round-about search for truth, and the hard processes through which his mind and heart had passed in the course of his religious pursuit, gave a peculiar shaping to his mental and spiritual character as a Christian. Some of his peculiar views, his views of Christian perfection, caught the attention of Wesley, who, stigmatized as a perfectionist himself, though coming very much nearer to the truth than the Alexandrian father, has ingeniously given a versified exposition of Clement's mistaken notion, and has embodied it in his collection of hymns and sacred poems. It seems fitting that one of the earliest hymnists among the Fathers should have his distinctive views thrown into a hymnic form by a modern Father of spiritual hymns and songs. Wesley sings "on Clement Alexandrinus's description of a perfect Christian: "

Here from afar the finish'd height

Of holiness is seen;

But oh what heavy tracts of toil,
What deserts lie between!

Man for the simple life divine
What will it cost to break,
Ere pleasure soft and wily pride
No more within him speak?

What ling'ring anguish must corrode
The root of nature's joy?

What secret shame and dire defeats

The pride of heart destroy?

Learn thou the whole of mortal state

In stillness to sustain;

Nor soothe with false delights of earth,
Whom God hath doomed to pain.

Thy mind no multitude of thoughts,
Nor stupor shall distress;

The venom of each latent vice
Wild images impress.