prostrate us, for the moment, like a tornado. Homesickness in a foreign
land,--an ocean stretching between us and the objects of our love--is
an admonition to us with respect to future, endless separations. The
hopeless death of a child has sometimes had the effect to change the
long-established faith of a parent with regard to future retribution;
all the acknowledged principles of interpretation, all the results of
meditation and prayer, the theory of the divine government which has
been built up in the soul, till it became identified with personal
consciousness, the whole analogy of faith,--all, have been swept away by
the overmastering power of parental love for one who, when he died, left
his friends to sorrow as they that have no hope. Now, supposing a parent
to fail of heaven, and to retain his instinctive parental feelings, the
endless separation between him and his family will be a source of sorrow
which needs only to be kept up, by an ever-living memory, to constitute
all which is pictured in the boldest metaphors of inspired tongues and
pens. A father in disgrace, or under ignominy, suffers intensely when
he sees or thinks of his children, provided his natural sensibilities
are not destroyed. A father punished, hereafter, by his Redeemer and
Judge, a father banished from the company of heaven, knowing that his
family are there, and that if his influence had had its full effect,
they would all have perished with him,--or a father with a part of his
children with him in perdition, the wife and mother with one or more of
the children in heaven,--is a picture of woe which nothing but timely
repentance and faith in Christ may prevent from being a reality in the
experience of some who read these lines. Can it be true, as Bishop Hall
says, that "to be happy is not so sweet a state as it is miserable to
have been happy"? O man, if you have a child in heaven, think that,
among the sweet influences of divine love, there probably is no more
powerful motive to draw your affections towards God, than that glimpse
which you sometimes seem to have of this child's face, on which heaven