by my side, and I read the words, “For the Lord God is a sun and shield, the Lord will give grace and glory.”  And I lift my eyes from my paper and look abroad from my window, and the sun is shining in its strength.  The leaves are dancing in the light wind that gives them each its share of the sun, and my trouble has passed away for ever, like the storm of that night and the unrest of that strange Sabbath.

Such comforts would come to us oftener from Nature, if we really believed that our God was the God of Nature; that when He made, or rather when He makes, He means; that not His hands only, but His heart too, is in the making of those things; that, therefore, the influences of Nature upon human minds and hearts are because He intended them.  And if we believe that our God is everywhere, why should we not think Him present even in the coincidences that sometimes seem so strange?  For, if He be in the things that coincide, He must be in the coincidence of those things.

Miss Oldcastle told me once that she could not take her eyes off a butterfly which was flitting about in the church all the time I was speaking of the resurrection of the dead.  I told the people that in Greek there was one word for the soul and for a butterfly—­Psyche; that I thought as the light on the rain made the natural symbol of mercy—­the rainbow, so the butterfly was the type in nature, and made to the end, amongst other ends, of being such a type—­of the resurrection of the human body; that its name certainly expressed the hope of the Greeks in immortality, while to us it speaks likewise of a glorified body, whereby we shall know and love each other with our eyes as well as our hearts.—­My sister saw the butterfly too, but only remembered that she had seen it when it was mentioned in her hearing:  on her the sight made no impression; she saw no coincidence.

I descended from the pulpit comforted by the sermon I had preached to myself.  But I was glad to feel justified in telling my people that, in consequence of the continued storm, for there had been no more of sunshine than just that watery gleam, there would be no service in the afternoon, and that I would instead visit some of my sick poor, whom the weather might have discomposed in their worn dwellings.

The people were very slow in dispersing.  There was so much putting on of clogs, gathering up of skirts over the head, and expanding of umbrellas, soon to be taken down again as worse than useless in the violence of the wind, that the porches were crowded, and the few left in the church detained till the others made way.  I lingered with these.  They were all poor people.

“I am sorry you will have such a wet walk home,” I said to Mrs Baird, the wife of old Reginald Baird, the shoemaker, a little wizened creature, with more wrinkles than hairs, who the older and more withered she grew, seemed like the kernels of some nuts only to grow the sweeter.

“It’s very good of you to let us off this afternoon, sir.  Not as I minds the wet:  it finds out the holes in people’s shoes, and gets my husband into more work.”