wandering, leads also through Divine aid to that peace which passeth
all understanding. Thus were the Hebrews led out of Egyptian bondage
through wanderings in the Wilderness to the Promised Land. Even thus,
through rites and ceremonies which to us are hieroglyphics hard to be
deciphered, which are known only as shrouded in infinite sorrow,--as
dimly shadowing forth some wild search in darkness and some final
resurrection into light,--through these, many from Egypt and India and
Scythia, from Scandinavia and from the aboriginal forests of America,
have for unnumbered ages passed from a world of bewildering error to the
heaven of their hopes. To the eye of sense and to shallow infidelity,
this may seem absurd; but the foolishness of man is the wisdom of God to
the salvation of His erring children. Happy, indeed, are the initiated!
Blessed are the poor in spirit, the Pariah, and the slave,--all they
whose eyes are veiled with overshadowing sorrow! for only thus is
revealed the glory of human life!

There are many things, kind reader, which, in our senseless staring, we
may call the signs of human weakness, but which, by a higher
interpretation, become revelations of human power. The gross and
pitiable features of the world are dissolved and clarified, when by an
impassioned sympathy we can penetrate to the heart of things. We are
about to pity the ragged vesture, the feeble knees, and the beseeching
hand of poverty, and the cries of the oppressed and the weary; but, at a
thought, Pity is slain by Reverence. We are ready to cry out against the
sluggish movement of the world and its lazy flux of life; but before the
satire is spoken, we are fascinated by an undercurrent of this same
world, earnest and full toward its sure goal,--of which, indeed, we only
dream; but "the dream is from God,"[3] and surer than sight. There is a
profounder calm than appears to the eye, in the quiet cottages scattered
up and down among the peaceful valleys; the rest of death is more