another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing, for them all the day long; and there shall be no might in thy hand.”  Pains of absence, sudden convulsions of feeling at the remembered looks, form, words, and motions of a loved one, sometimes are as when men feel the earth quaking under them; and then, again, they entirely 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 has traced its lineaments of peace and bliss; or that sudden whisper of a gentle, child-like voice, now and then heard by the ear of fancy, persuading you to be a Christian.  Do not let the world, or shame, or procrastination, lead you to resist such efforts of almighty love to save you.  He who has had a child saved by Christ, and will not be himself a Christian,—­what more can God do to save him?