and discipline have been violently canvassed among professing Christians, and attacks of long-sustained vigour and virulence have been made on almost every leading article of the Christian creed by the avowed enemies or the only half-hostile critics of the Church, which the champions of Scripture truth have not been backward to repel.  Amid all this confusion and strife of assault and resistance one thing stands out clearly:  Christianity and its progress are more interesting to the national mind than ever before.  It has been well, too, that through all those fifty years a large-minded and fervent but most unobtrusive and practical piety has been enthroned in the highest places of the land—­a piety which will escape the condemnation of the King when He shall come in His glory, and say to many false followers, “I was an hungred, and ye gave Me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took Me not in; naked, and ye clothed Me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited Me not.”

These dread words are not for those who have cared as our Sovereign Lady and her beloved ones have cared for the sick and the suffering and the sad; who have bound up the heart-wounds of the widow and the orphan and ministered to their earthly needs; who, like our lost Princess Alice and her royal elder sister, have tended the victims of war, shrinking from no ghastliness or repulsiveness, no horrors of the hospital where victor and vanquished lay moaning in common misery; or, like their queenly mother, have shed the sunshine of royal smiles and soothing words and helpful alms upon the obscurer but hardly less pitiable patients who crowd our English infirmaries.  In her northern and southern “homes” of Osborne and Balmoral the Queen, too, has been able to share a true, unsophisticated friendship with her humble neighbours, to rejoice in their joys and lighten their griefs with gentle, most efficient sympathy.  It was of a Highland cottage that Dr. Guthrie wrote that “within its walls the Queen had stood, with her kind hands smoothing the thorns of a dying man’s pillow.  There, left alone with him at her own request, she had sat by the bed of death—­a Queen ministering to the comfort of a saint.”  It was in a cottage at Osborne that the same gentle and august almsgiver was found reading comfortable Scripture words to a sick and aged peasant, quietly retiring upon the entrance of the clerical visitant, that his message of peace might be freely given, and thus allowing the sufferer to disclose to the pastor that the lady in the widow’s weeds was Victoria of England.  These are examples, which it would be easy to multiply, of that true oneness of feeling between the lofty and the lowly which is the special, the unique glory of Christ’s kingdom.  May our land never lack them; may they multiply themselves to all time.