the Founder of our faith, that when we fast we are to anoint our countenances and not to seem to fast, enjoins a certain liveliness of face.  Sydney Smith, when a poor curate at Foster-le-Clay, a dreary, desolate place, wrote:  “I am resolved to like it, and to reconcile myself to it, which is more manly than to fancy myself above it, and to send up complaints by the post of being thrown away, or being desolated, and such like trash.”  And he acted up to this; said his prayers, made his jokes, did his duty, and, Upon fine mornings, used to draw up the blinds of his parlor, open the window, and “glorify the room,” as he called the operation, with sunshine.  But all the sunshine without was nothing to the sunshine within the heart.  It was that which made him go through life so bravely and so well; it is that, too, which renders his life a lesson to us all.

We must also remember that the career of a poor curate is not the most brilliant in the world.  That of an apprentice boy has more fun in it; that of a milliner’s girl has more merriment and fewer depressing circumstances.  To hear always the same mistrust of Providence, to see poverty, to observe all kinds of trial, to witness death-bed scenes—­this is not the most enlivening course of existence, even if a clergyman be a man of mark and of station.  But there was one whose station was not honored, nay, even by some despised, and who had sorer trials than Sydney Smith.  His name is well known in literature; and his writings and his example still teach us in religion.  This was Robert Hall, professor of a somber creed in a somber flat country, as flat and “deadly-lively,” as they say, as need be.  To add to difficulties and troubles, the minister was plagued with about as painful an illness as falls to the lot of humanity to bear.  He had fought with infidelity and doubt; he had refused promotion, because he would do his duty where it had pleased God to place him; next he had to show how well he could bear pain.  In all his trials he had been cheerful, forcible, natural, and straightforward.  In this deep one he preserved the same character.  Forced to throw himself down and writhe upon the floor in his paroxysms of pain, he rose up, livid with exhaustion, and with the sweat of anguish on his brow, without a murmur.

In the whole library of brave anecdote there is no tale of heroism which, to us, beats this.  It very nearly equals that of poor, feeble Latimer, cheering up his fellow-martyr as he walked to the stake, “Be of good cheer, brother Ridley; we shall this day light such a fire in England as by God’s grace shall not be readily put out.”  The very play upon the torture is brave, yet pathetic.  Wonderful, too, was the boldness and cheerfulness of another martyr, Rowland Taylor, who, stripped to his shirt, was forced to walk toward the stake, who answered the jeers of his persecutors and the tears of his friends with the same noble constant smile, and, meeting two of his very old parishioners who wept, stopped and cheered them as he went, adding, that he went on his way rejoicing.