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."

GEORGE MORLEY.--"But more difficult it is to recognise 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 God!' But where Fortune brings no
vicissitude; where her wheel runs smooth, dropping wealth or honours as
it rolls--where Affliction centres its work within the secret,
unrevealing heart--there, even the wisest man may not readily perceive by
what means Heaven is admonishing, forcing, or wooing him nearer to
itself. I take the case of a man in whom Heaven acknowledges a favoured
son. I assume his outward life crowned with successes, his mind stored
with opulent gifts, his nature endowed with lofty virtues; what an heir
to train through the brief school of earth for due place in the ages that
roll on for ever! But this man has a parasite weed in each bed of a soul
rich in flowers;--weed and flowers intertwined, stem with stem--their
fibres uniting even deep down to the root.

"Can you not conceive with what untiring vigilant care Heaven will seek to
disentangle the flower from the weed?--how (let me drop inadequate
metaphor)--how Heaven will select for its warning chastisements that very
error which the man has so blent with his virtues that he holds it a
virtue itself?--how, gradually, slowly, pertinaciously, it will gather
this beautiful nature all to itself--insist on a sacrifice it will ask
from no other? To complete the true nature of poor William Losely,
Heaven ordained the sacrifice of worldly repute; to complete the true