With softened light, and grief’s dread, dark array. 
  Shrined in its midst, with folded hands, at rest,
    Life’s work all over ere ’twas well begun,
  Lies a fair girl in snowy garments dressed,
    And all the place with bud and bloom o’errun;
  Pinks, roses, lilies, blend in odorous death,
  But over all the tuberose sends its wealth,
  Seeming to hold the lost one by its breath
  While creeping o’er our living hearts in stealth. 
  O subtle blossoms, you are death’s own flowers! 
  You have no part with love or festal hours.

* * * * *

YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS.

BY RUSSELL STURGIS, JR.

[Illustration:  GEORGE WILLIAMS. Founder of Young Men’s Christian Associations.]

There is an old French proverb which runs:  “L’homme propose, et Dieu dispose,” which is but the echo of the Scripture, “A man’s heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps.”  In truth, God alone sees the end from the beginning.

From the beginning men have been constantly building better than they knew.  No unprejudiced man who looks at history can fail to see from how small and apparently unimportant an event has sprung the greatest results to the individual, the nation, and the world.  The Christian, at least, needs no other explanation of this than that his God, without whose knowledge no sparrow falleth to the ground, guides all the affairs of the world.  Surely God did not make the world, and purchase the salvation of its tenants by the sacrifice of his Son, to take no further interest in it, but leave it subject either to fixed law or blind chance!  Indeed the God who provided for the wants of his people in the wilderness is a God who changeth not.  The principles which once guided him must guide him to-day and forever.  There never has been a time when to the open eye it was not clear that he provides for every want of his creatures.  Did chance or the unassisted powers of man discover coal, when wood was becoming scarce? and oil and gas from coal, when the whale was failing?  Cowper’s mind was clear when he said:—­

  “Deep in unfathomable mines
    With never-failing skill,
  He treasures up his bright designs,
    And works his gracious will.”

If in his temporal affairs God cares for man, much more will he do for his soul.  Great multitudes of young men came to be congregated in the cities, and Satan spread his nets at every street-corner to entrap them.

In 1837, George Williams, then sixteen years of age, employed in a dry-goods establishment, in Bridgewater, England, gave himself to the service of the Lord Jesus Christ.  He immediately began to influence the young men with him, and many of them were converted.  In 1841, Williams came to London, and entered the dry-goods house of Hitchcock and Company.  Here he found himself one of more than eighty young men, almost none of them Christians.  He found, however, among them a few professed Christians, and these he gathered in his bedroom, to pray for the rest.  The number increased—­a larger room was necessary, which was readily obtained from Mr. Hitchcock.  The work spread from one establishment to another, and on the sixth of June, 1844, in Mr. Williams’s bedroom the first Young Men’s Christian Association was formed.