[Footnote *:  Many, in those days, believed in astrology.]

I had more than ordinary attention during my discourse, at one point in which I saw the down-bent head of Catherine Weir sink yet lower upon her hands.  After a moment, however, she sat more erect than before, though she never lifted her eyes to meet mine.  I need not assure my reader that she was not present to my mind when I spoke the words that so far had moved her.  Indeed, had I thought of her, I could not have spoken them.

As I came out of the church, my people crowded about me with outstretched hands and good wishes.  One woman, the aged wife of a more aged labourer, who could not get near me, called from the outskirts of the little crowd—­

“May the Lord come and see ye every day, sir.  And may ye never know the hunger and cold as me and Tomkins has come through.”

“Amen to the first of your blessing, Mrs Tomkins, and hearty thanks to you.  But I daren’t say Amen to the other part of it, after what I’ve been preaching, you know.”

“But there’ll be no harm if I say it for ye, sir?”

“No, for God will give me what is good, even if your kind heart should pray against it.”

“Ah, sir, ye don’t know what it is to be hungry and cold.”

“Neither shall you any more, if I can help it.”

“God bless ye, sir.  But we’re pretty tidy just in the meantime.”

I walked home, as usual on Sunday mornings, by the road.  It was a lovely day.  The sun shone so warm that you could not help thinking of what he would be able to do before long—­draw primroses and buttercups out of the earth by force of sweet persuasive influences.  But in the shadows lay fine webs and laces of ice, so delicately lovely that one could not but be glad of the cold that made the water able to please itself by taking such graceful forms.  And I wondered over again for the hundredth time what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of nature, always kept it beautiful.  The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought.  Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether what He wants us to be, so holy, therefore all His works declare Him in beauty; His fingers can touch nothing but to mould it into loveliness; and even the play of His elements is in grace and tenderness of form.

And then I thought how the sun, at the farthest point from us, had begun to come back towards us; looked upon us with a hopeful smile; was like the Lord when He visited His people as a little one of themselves, to grow upon the earth till it should blossom as the rose in the light of His presence.  “Ah!  Lord,” I said, in my heart, “draw near unto Thy people.  It is spring-time with Thy world, but yet we have cold winds and bitter hail, and pinched voices forbidding them that follow Thee and follow