tidings? And those who are near you! To-morrow, to-day, now perhaps,
while you are listening to me, a fatal malady is discovering its first
symptoms----. Have you received the hard lessons of death? If you see
children playing, full of ruddy and joyous health, does it happen to
none of you to think of another child, once the joy of your fireside,
now lying beneath the sod? Does it never happen to you, by a sinister
presentiment, to see features you love to gaze on convulsed with agony
or pale in death? And yet you must either see the death of your beloved
ones, or they must lay you in the earth; for every life ends with the
tomb, and we do but walk over graves. When the soul has been thus
wounded by anxiety, for this poisoned wound there is one remedy, but
only one: "God reigns!" Nothing happens without the permission of His
goodness. And of all those who are dear to us, we can say: "Father, to
Thy hands I commit them." If we are without this trust, we shall only
escape torment by levity. Without God our mind is sick; our conscience
and our heart are sick also, and in a way more grievous still.


FOOTNOTES:

[19] _Méditation troisième_, at the end.

[20] Gen. xxviii. 16.

[21] _Démontrer_.

[22] "_On le montre_."

[23] "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.... Let us hear the conclusion
of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is