The Active Christian

We missed him when he was gone. When he went hence he left something more than a tomb behind him. He left a goodly heritage of holy deeds. There is a fragrant perfume yet lingering about his ‘precious’ memory — the trail of light that followed his luminous pathway has not yet died away from our saddened vision.

He was a legible Christian. There was no mistaking him. He never stood upon debatable ground — he never required one to search the church records to see whether he were a “professor of religion.” We &lfeU his religion.

You might follow him at any time by the fragrance of his Christ-like deeds of well-doing. You might enter the house of sorrow and see that he had been there by the weeping eyes once more dried, and the broken hearts bound up. You might enter the abode of poverty, and see that he had been there by the plentiful stores which his bounty had left behind, by the food and the raiment, by the consoling tract left upon the table, and the Bible set there, as a household-lamp to cheer the thick darkness. If you saw a group of children gathered by the way-side, you might conjecture that he was there “in the midst of them,” opening his package of little books, and dealing them out to the happy little throng. “We all felt him in every good enterprise — in the social prayer-circle, in the Sabbath-school.

in the church, and (quite as much as any-Avliere else) at his own hearth-stone.

But now there is a great blank in our social gatherings, in our evening meetings, in everything. We wait in vain for his beseeching tremulous voice that well we knew “sank in the ear of Jesus.” The Teachers’ prayer-meeting is not the same thing that it once was, now that he is gone. And as for the little flock of cottagers that used to gather in to the Widow M.’s Wednesday evening meeting, they are left as sheep without a shepherd. The good old mother in Israel will hear no longer the cheerful salutation that was wont to greet her, as his slender form appeared in her door-way, sometimes covered with snow, sometimes dripping with the rain. She need not set out the little table any longer, with its white napkin, and the tattered Bible and “Village

Hymns” upon it. “Poor Henry!” she used to say, as lie closed her cottage-door, “I fear he is not long for this world; there is a red spot on his cheek that looks like consumption; he is ripening fast for heaven.”

It was but a little time since a long procession wound its way, with many a weeping eye, out of the village church-yard. That grave, beside which you may sometimes see an aged woman in black, bending at the hour of twilight, is his. There is a touching pathos in the date —” ctged twenty-four years’ His slight form and boyish expression made him look younger than that, but his piety had the ripe maturity of threescore.

“How short his day! the glorious prize To om- sad hearts and weeping eyes Appear’d too quickly won;

The soldier rushed into the field, With arm invincible to wield The Spirit’s sword, the Spirit’s shield, When lo! the fight was done 1”