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720 ible tenderness of the Omniscient has been more visibly clear than in that of your guest William Losely?"

(surprised). "Clear? To me, I confess that if ever there were an instance in which the Divine tenderness, the Divine justice, which I can never presume to doubt, was yet undiscernible to my bounded vision, it is in the instance of the very life you refer to. I see a man of admirable virtues—of a child-like simplicity of character, which makes him almost unconscious of the grandeur of his own soul—involved by a sublime self-sacrifice—by a virtue, not by a fault—in the most dreadful of human calamities—ignominious degradation;—hurled in the midday of life from the sphere of honest men—a felon's brand on his name—a vagrant in his age; justice at last, but tardy and niggard, and giving him but little joy when it arrives; because, ever thinking only of others, his heart is wrapped in a child whom he cannot make happy in the way in which his hopes have been set!—George—no, your illustration might be turned by a skeptic into an argument against you."

. "Not unless the skeptic refused the elementary starting-ground from which you and I may reason; not if it be granted that Man has a soul, which it is the object of this life to enrich and develop for another. We know from my uncle what William Losely was before that calamity befell him—a genial boon-companion—a careless, frank, 'good fellow'—all the virtues you now praise in him dormant, unguessed even by himself. Suddenly came Caamity!—suddenly arose the ! Degradation of name, and with it dignity of nature? How poor, how slight, how insignificant William Losely, the hanger-on of rural Thanes, compared with that William Waife whose entrance into this house, you—despite that felon's brand when you knew it was the martyr's glory—greeted with noble reverence: whom, when the mind itself was stricken down—only the soul left to the wreck of the body—you tended with such pious care as he lay on your father's bed! And do you, who hold Nobleness in such honor—do you, of all men, tell me that you cannot recognize that Celestial tenderness which ennobled a Spirit for all Eternity?"

"George, you are right!" cried Darrell; "and I was a blockhead and blunderer, as man always is when he mistakes a speck in his telescope for a blotch in the sun of a system."

. "But more difficult it is to recognize the mysterious agencies of Heavenly Love when no great worldly adversity forces us to pause and question. Let Fortune strike down a victim, and even the heathen cries 'This is the hand of