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 fire: The Lord thy God is a consuming fire. That same God did David behold: The Lord is full of compassion and mercy: long-suffering and of great goodness. To him then was He not all white? Isaiah beheld him: Wherefore art Thou red in Thine apparel? and seeing Him executing vengeance, He was like to the ruby. John beheld Him, and a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald. Lo! what variety, and yet what unity!”

One of the most curious ideas of Osorius is the following. He says that as he lies in bed he hears the stroke, stroke, of his heart; and it sounds to him as though within were two wood-cutters engaged night and day in hewing down a tree. Nor am I wrong in thinking so, he continues, for Flux and Reflux are engaged every hour in laying their axes to the root of the tree of life. In another sermon he speaks of men fretting over the loss of worldly goods and neglecting their eternal inheritance as resembling the little boy who has built a mud castle, and who weeps when a passer-by overthrows it with his foot, though he cares nothing that a lawsuit is going on at the time by which a large inheritance is being wrested from him.

The following is singularly beautiful, to my mind. Osorius is speaking of the dower Christ has given to His Church. He says, that as when a traveller marries a wife in a far country he gives her a few presents, but says to her, O my beloved, when we come home to my own country, where all my wealth and property are, then you shall have ten thousand times better presents; so does Christ act with His Church. Here,