GRIEF NOT FORGOTTEN.

REV. WILLIAM BLAIR, M.A., Dunblane.

WHEN God sends grief to any of His children, He has a two-fold purpose in view: to awaken thought in them at the time, and to lay up for them a store of instruction and profit for the future. The immediate effect of God's visitations to us by the death of dear babes is preparatory to the higher end and ultimate effect. Grief, as the word literally signifies, is heaviness, and, therefore not "joyous." But the heaviness "must needs be" to create anything like a real, deep impression in the soul. If adversity is to afford "sweet uses," the bitter must be tasted first. No permanent benefit will result from a superficial contact with sorrow. What the poet sings of "a little learning" is equally applicable to our experience of grief: we must "drink deep or taste not," if we would enjoy the outcome of genuine tribulation. It depends very much on the entertainment we give to impressions of sorrow, whether the future will bring a blessing back to our bosom. The world's way is to shut down grief as it shuts down the coffin lid on the dead, to let the waves of worldliness rush in as they do behind the keel that has parted them asunder. In plain words, the world's remedy is oblivion, utter extinction of the sight or sound of the objects of buried affection and hope. Nor is that fatalistic way of submitting to sorrow as an inevitable necessity, as devotees beneath the wheels of inexorable destiny, one whit more Christian or child

like than the sullen forgetfulness of the worldling. The virtues of submission, of holy resignation to God's will, of softened and sanctified experience, will never grow on such wild olives. Very significant are Paul's words of warning, neither to "despise the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when we are rebuked of Him.” Those who grow hard in the fire affect to despise " grief as a thing unmanly, womanish, weak, and unworthy of being cherished in the memory or the heart. And, to some extent they are right, when we analyse the kind of grief they indulge.

66

It

It is grief as a sentiment that is weak and "shallow," not as a motive power in the soul. Let sentimental, sensational grief be unremembered, for it is no better than noisy laughter. It touches only the surface: it has no power to stir the depths of our nature. weaves its immortelles, and hangs them around the tomb, and straightway forgets what manner of man it once was. But genuine, real grief is not forgetful nor empty. It is a fruitful bough by a well whose branches run over the wall. It is a full rounded cluster wherein is the wine of life;" 'destroy it not, for there is a blessing in it." Keep alive the memory of your grief, the hallowed associations with which it is entwined, the nearness of your soul to God when heaven seemed let down to earth to take from you the best of earth to heaven, the reality of prayer then offered, and of the answer received, and the rapture of heavenly joy in which you walked when your home was "the valley of the shadow of death." Cherish the memory,

freshen the sense you have of your grief, not to throw shadows athwart your pathway, but to brighten it with light from heaven. Visit in thought the chamber

where the strife of death was waged, and the churchyard corner where you deposited the precious dust, and think of the transfiguration, now that the decease has been acomplished, and the new link to bind your heart to the unseen, and the grand re-union coming nearer every day, and then the untold happiness not of "months in the New Jerusalem," but of "for ever with the Lord," and with all you have loved and lost, but found again when you shall be found of Christ at His coming.

Lord Monboddo lost a beloved daughter, and grieved after a worldly sort over her. Her picture on the wall only reminded him of his misery. A friend drew a curtain over that picture: upon which the sad father said, "That is kind: come now, and let us read Herodotus." Miserable comforter, that romancing father of Greek history to a grieving father! Seek not so to bury your sorrow. "Go and tell Jesus," as John's disciples did when their master was taken away. That is the way to get your grief assuaged, to have it transfigured so that the carte in the album, or the bust on the wall, or the head-stone at the grave, will bring no shade of gloom around your brow; but each remembrancer of your little one may prove a beckoning light up through the darkness to the light that is inaccessible and full of glory. That is the way to get the breach healed. It may be that in the first outburst of your

sorrow, when your sons and daughters rose up to comfort you, you put aside their ministry of consolation, and, like Jacob, said, "I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning." But, in the end of the days when parting words are spoken, Benoni, the son of sorrow, has become Benjamin, the son of my right hand, and the crowning benediction rests on the head of him that was separate from his brethren. Then, in the light of Heaven every shadow of earth's darkness will flee away, every Gethsemane become an Olivet, every step in the vale of tears a step in your ascension to the everlasting Kingdom.

ARE THERE

INFANTS IN HEAVEN?

REV. DR. J. LOGAN AIKMAN, GLASGOW.

It is

Do deceased infants remain infants in heaven? surely worse than trifling with scripture to make the phrase, “small and great," place infants, as such, before the judgment-throne. To talk of the lisping lips and pattering feet of children on the floor of heaven is truly painful. Had these infants lived to riper years, some of them might have loved and served Christ, and gone from manhood's prime to fill lofty thrones. Can any sense of privation flow from God's removal of them into His own glorious presence? Can they be inferior in heaven to what they might have become upon the earth?

The idea of continued infancy carries in it the thought of privation. Some would assure mourning

mothers of having their beloved infants restored to their fond embrace. Do they seriously reflect upon what they say? Were distance, and not death, the form of separation, they would be justly viewed as "miserable comforters." Tell a mother, parting from her child because of climate, that she will again receive him, ten or twenty years hence, in precisely the same condition. Would she not resent it as an insult thus to dwarf her noble boy, and imprison him for years in an infant's frame? Surely the same reasoning applies to death as to distance, and equally to heaven and earth. Our whole nature, instinctively, appeals to the law of progress as the law of life. To contemplate eternal infancy in heaven is to think of ignorance in the land of vision, of weakness in the scene of power, and of imprisoned faculties in the presence of the glorified Redeemer.

When infants rise to heaven they are subject to the law of life, and advance in the development of their being at a pace unknown on earth. When we ask the mother to look beyond her own loss to her child's gain, we think of that sainted spirit as rising more rapidly to manhood's fulness, and heaven's excellence, than if he had lived on earth. How can an intelligent mother ever become reconciled to her personal loss, or even rise above the thought of her child's loss, if, as she sees the remaining members of her family increase in stature, knowledge, and wisdom, she must needs think of the brightest and best of them, whom God has sainted, as retained in perpetual infancy? Much as