they like that one voice should tell the thoughts of several minds, one gesture proclaim that the same life is at the same moment in many breasts.

’I am myself most happy in my lonely Sundays, and do not feel the need of any social worship, as I have not for several years, which I have passed in the same way.  Sunday is to me priceless as a day of peace and solitary reflection.  To all who will, it may be true, that, as Herbert says:—­

      “Sundays the pillars are
      On which Heaven’s palace arched lies;
      The other days fill up the space
      And hollow room with vanities;”

and yet in no wise “vanities,” when filtered by the Sunday crucible.  After much troubling of the waters of my life, a radiant thought of the meaning and beauty of earthly existence will descend like a healing angel.  The stillness permits me to hear a pure tone from the One in All.  But often I am not alone.  The many now, whose hearts, panting for truth and love, have been made known to me, whose lives flow in the same direction as mine, and are enlightened by the same star, are with me.  I am in church, the church invisible, undefiled by inadequate expression.  Our communion is perfect; it is that of a common aspiration; and where two or three are gathered together in one region, whether in the flesh or the spirit, He will grant their request.  Other communion would be a happiness,—­to break together the bread of mutual thought, to drink the wine of loving life,—­but it is not necessary.

’Yet I cannot but feel that the crowd of men whose pursuits are not intellectual, who are not brought by their daily walk into converse with sages and poets, who win their bread from an earth whose mysteries are not open to them, whose worldly intercourse is more likely to stifle than to encourage the sparks of love and faith in their breasts, need on that day quickening more than repose.  The church is now rather a lecture-room than a place of worship; it should be a school for mutual instruction.  I must rejoice when any one, who lays spiritual things to heart, feels the call rather to mingle with men, than to retire and seek by himself.

’You speak of men going up to worship by “households,” &c.  Were the actual family the intellectual family, this might be; but as social life now is, how can it?  Do we not constantly see the child, born in the flesh to one father, choose in the spirit another?  No doubt this is wrong, since the sign does not stand for the thing signified, but it is one feature of the time.  How will it end?  Can families worship together till it does end?

* * * * *