It may only have been the occasion for a revelation of the strength that was in her.  Reading, however, under such circumstances, is likely to be peculiarly profitable.  It is never so profitable as when it is undertaken in order that a positive need may be satisfied or an inquiry answered.  She discovered in the Bible much that persons to whom it is a mere literature would never find.  The water of life was not merely admirable to the eye; she drank it, and knew what a property it possessed for quenching thirst.  No doubt the thought of a heaven hereafter was especially consolatory.  She was able to endure, and even to be happy because the vision of lengthening sorrow was bounded by a better world beyond.  “A very poor, barbarous gospel,” thinks the philosopher who rests on his Marcus Antoninus and Epictetus.  I do not mean to say, that in the shape in which she believed this doctrine, it was not poor and barbarous, but yet we all of us, whatever our creed may be, must lay hold at times for salvation upon something like it.  Those who have been plunged up to the very lips in affliction know its necessity.  To such as these it is idle work for the prosperous and the comfortable to preach satisfaction with the life that now is.  There are seasons when it is our sole resource to recollect that in a few short years we shall be at rest.  While upon this subject I may say, too, that some injustice has been done to the Christian creed of immortality as an influence in determining men’s conduct.  Paul preached the imminent advent of Christ and besought his disciples, therefore, to watch, and we ask ourselves what is the moral value to us of such an admonition.  But surely if we are to have any reasons for being virtuous, this is as good as any other.  It is just as respectable to believe that we ought to abstain from iniquity because Christ is at hand, and we expect to meet Him, as to abstain from it because by our abstention we shall be healthier or more prosperous.  Paul had a dream—­an absurd dream let us call it—­of an immediate millennium, and of the return of his Master surrounded with divine splendour, judging mankind and adjusting the balance between good and evil.  It was a baseless dream, and the enlightened may call it ridiculous.  It is anything but that, it is the very opposite of that.  Putting aside its temporary mode of expression, it is the hope and the prophecy of all noble hearts, a sign of their inability to concur in the present condition of things.

Going back to Clem’s wife; she laid hold, as I have said, upon heaven.  The thought wrought in her something more than forgetfulness of pain or the expectation of counterpoising bliss.  We can understand what this something was, for although we know no such heaven as hers, a new temper is imparted to us, a new spirit breathed into us; I was about to say a new hope bestowed upon us, when we consider that we live surrounded by the soundless depths in which the stars repose.  Such a consideration