that they have felt the Hand of the great Healer, to whom power is given over all flesh-all power in Heaven and on earth. CHURCH, Dean of St. Paul's.

LXXXVI.

Nicknames.

R. W.

NICKNAMES, for the most part,

govern the world. The history

of politics, of religion, of literature of morals, and of private life, is too often little less than the history of nicknames... They are the talismans and spells that collect and set in motion all the combustible part of men's passions and prejudices, which have hitherto played so much more successful a game, and done their

work so much more effectually than reason, in all the grand concerns and petty details of human life, and do not yet seem tired of the task assigned them. Nicknames are the convenient portable tools, by which they simplify the process of mischief, and get through their job with the least time and trouble. These worthless, unmeaning, irritating, envenomed words of reproach are the established signs by which the different compartments of society are ticketed, labelled, and marked out for each other's contempt and hatred. . . . We are eager to indulge our hasty feelings to the utmost, lest, by stopping to examine, we should find that there is no excuse for them. The very consciousness of the injustice we

may be doing another makes us only the more loud and bitter in our invectives against him. . . . A nickname carries the height of the pride, the indolence, the cowardice, the ignorance, and the ill-nature of mankind on its side.-HAZLITT.

LXXXVII.

THE more the Christian goes on, through the course of years, towards the horizon of eternity, the more, above all things else, does his faith deepen-as the traveller crossing the Alps, as he rises, sees the intermediate heights diminish, until at last nothing meets his gaze but the supreme summit of Mont Blanc. - LACORDAIRE (Conference XIV.)

LXXXVIII.

TRUTH to oneself: All men have

Not

a deep interest that each man should tell himself the truth. only will he become a better man, but he will understand them better. If men knew themselves, they could not be intolerant to others.-SIR A. HELPS (Friends in Council).

LXXXIX.

CHARITY and prudence are not

parasitical plants which require boles of falsehood to climb up upon. It is often extremely difficult in the mixed things of this world to act truly and kindly too; but therein lies one of the great trials of a man, that his sincerity should have kind

ness in it, and his kindness truth.-SIR ARTHUR HELPS (Friends in Council.)

XC.

THERE is no road, howsoever

holy, which has not its own détours.-GUILLORÉ.

XCI.

WEAK health, instead of opening

the heart, often makes a man supremely careful of his bodily ease and well-being. . . . Pain, which by nature leads us only to ourselves, carries on the Christian mind from the thought of self to the contemplation of Christ; He is the great object of our faith, and while we gaze upon Him we learn to forget ourselves.J. H. NEWMAN.