with my fathers, if God be gracious to me and make me fit for Him
as this blessed child was. The Lord Jesus sanctify this and all my
other afflictions, Amen! Here ends the joy of my life, and for
which I go even mourning to my grave."

This great love and reverence for little children is peculiarly in accord
with Christianity, for we should remember that it was the WISE men,
who, when they had journeyed far across the world to salute the King
of kings, laid their offerings down at the feet of a little child.

Is there not something to reverence in faith and resignation such as are
here expressed by Evelyn? Were not these men of old with their
unshakable faith and simple piety better and happier than those who in
these days know so much more and believe so much less?

We, no doubt, have the knowledge, but perhaps they had the wisdom.

I think, Antony, that in the history of England we shall have
difficulty in finding any of our greatest men whose hearts and minds
were not filled with a reverence for God and a faith in something
beyond the blind forces which are all that Science has to offer
mankind as a guide of life.

All who have acted most nobly from the days of Ralegh and Sir Thomas
More, down to the days of Gordon of Khartoum, and down again to our
own days when the youth of England upheld the invincible valour,
self-sacrifice, and glory of their race in the greatest of all wars,--all
have been filled with the love of God and have found therein a perfect
serenity in the face of death, and that peace which passeth all
understanding.