WITH

TWIN SONNETS.

IN VAIN.

TH wide wing once my thought o'er Wisdom's plain
Circled, or soared to scan her stateliest height;

Now, baulked by bar and dulled by dark, for light,

For air, my wan weak spirit pines in vain.

When the strong eagle first was trapped, its pain,

In steel fangs clutched, gasped with shrill scream; its might In madness writhed 'gainst torture, till the tight Teeth closed round each fierce throe with fiercer strain.

But now, in Fate's fast fetters held, I lie

Nerveless, too weak for pain, too worn for rage.
Too late would come the sunshine to assuage
The dim dark dungeon torpor whence I cry,
With a monotonous moan, within my cage,
"Thou, alone merciful, God! let me die!"

NOT IN VAIN.

Fate's fetters bind my strength to chain and bar;
Fate's failures blot my aim in hueless gloom.
Upon each tearful dawn is writ the doom
Of tempest day. Night's shadows clash in war
Of phantoms' vain to seize but strong to mar
Each bright resolve with rust, quick to consume
Each hope of heart to ashes of the tomb.

I know nor work nor rest nor sun nor star.

Yet, Fate has failed. I conquer though I die.

For, while this body writhes like worm down-trod, My soul, with tameless strength and tearless eye, Yea! though my heart-drops idly drench the sod, Through bolt and bar speeds spirit-words that fly Triumphant in secure appeal to God.

K. R.

GOD is near.

PRIEDIEU PAPERS.

No. X. THE PRESENCE OF God.

All the things that we dare to say about God need to be raised above the weakness and narrowness of our poor human words in order to be true of God. Even this, God is near, is less than the truth. Things are near when they are separated by only a small space; and in this sense God cannot be merely near, He is more than near. Yet St. Paul uses those three little words, Prope est Dominus, as a sufficient sanction for the sublime code of virtue which he inculcates on his Christian converts in their first fervour. "Let your modesty be known to all men the Lord is nigh."

"The Lord is nigh." God's nearness to us, the presence of God, is motive enough for the practice of modesty and of every Christian virtue. Yes, practical faith in the presence of that almighty God who made us and who will judge us, is one of the most powerful motives urging us on to all that is good, one of the most powerful restraining influences to keep us back from everything that is evil. Nay, we might speak more boldly and call it absolutely the most powerful of all motives: for every other supernatural motive depends for its efficacy upon this, and this one motive may be said to include every other.

No doubt, when one is insisting on any special point like this, one is always prone, in describing its importance, to use superlatives, which very properly are received with suspicion. A lawyer, for instance, does not expect to be taken quite literally when he assures a jury that never before in the entire course of his professional experience has he been more profoundly impressed with the justice of any cause entrusted to his feeble advocacy than he is on the present occasion. Even preachers and spiritual writers may unwittingly come under the influence of this natural feeling which attaches undue weight to the subject that for the time engrosses one's attention. But there is none even of this allowable exaggeration in saying that no point of our spiritual life can be more important, no means of sanctification can be more easy and more efficacious, no supernatural truth can be more fruitful in its

results on the soul, than the abiding sense of the presence of God.

Let us, then, with all the faith, hope, charity, and contrition, of which our souls, such as we have made them, are capable, renew our belief in this plain, grand, fundamental dogma, that the almighty and everlasting God, Creator and sovereign Lord of Heaven and Earth, of angels and men, is present everywhere and always; that, as His eternity embraces in itself all the fleeting moments of our finite time, so His divine immensity contains supereminently and transcendantly all our relations of place and space; that He is nearer to us, more intimately joined to us, than we are to our own souls; for, as St. Paul told the men of Athens, "He is not far from each one of us, for in Him we live and move and are."

God therefore is present everywhere, not merely by his knowledge of what takes place everywhere, or as a king is present by his authority in every part of his kingdom. He his present everywhere as that king is present in the palace which he inhabits or on the throne on which he sits-as He is present to those on whom his eye falls or to whom his voice reaches. In all these meanings and manners, and in ways inconceivably closer aud more intimate, God is really and necessarily present in every part of the universe which He has drawn out of nothing and which He maintains in existence at every instant-present to all His creatures, present in all His creatures, with all His infinite attributes, by essence as well as by knowledge and power.

Reason itself goes far to tell us that all this must be so, and faith more plainly says that so it is. "Whither shall I go from thy spirit?"-these are the inspired words of God Himself who puts them on the lips of the creature addressing his divine Creator

"Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy face? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there; if I descend into hell, thou art present. If I take my wings early in the morning and dwell in the uttermost part of the sea, even there also shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me. And I said: Perhaps darkness shall cover me' . but darkness shall not be dark to Thee, and night shall be light as the day." (Psalm cxxxviii, 7-12).

This illustration which the Royal psalmist here draws from the light of day is the first which occurs to us all when we strive to realise dimly and afar off this truth of the ubiquity, the

immensity, the universal presence of God. Simple as light is His nature "so the Christian slave tries to explain this doctrine to Fabiola in Cardinal Wiseman's well known tale which takes its name from hers, and which, though a mere fiction, is in its subject and in its authorship sacred enough to be quoted here--" simple as light is His nature, one and the same everywhere, indivisible, undefilable, penetrating yet diffusive, ubiquitous and unlimited. He existed long before there was any beginning; He will exist after all ending has ceased. Power, wisdom, goodness, lovejustice, too, and unerring judgment-belong to Him by His nature, and are as unlimited and unrestrained as it. He alone can create, He alone preserve, He alone destroy."

Syra goes on-and this is the part which bears more directly on our subject-she goes on to tell her young mistress that to watch and note the thoughts and actions of all His creatures is no toil or trouble for this infinite and almighty Being, far less than for the sun to light up with his rays the waters of the stream that was running beside them, down to the very pebbles on its bed. Well might the Roman lady, who had hitherto been a pagan, exclaim with a shudder: "What an awful idea that one has never been alone, has never had a wish to oneself, has never held a single thought in secret, has never hidden the most foolish fancy of a proud or childish brain from the observation of One who knows no imperfection! Terrible thought, that one is living under the steady gaze of an all-seeing Eye, of which the sun is but a shadow, for he enters not, the soul!"

One who really lived at the time in which Cardinal Wiseman has laid his story-which will be read when his graver treatises are neglected the early Christian apologist Athenagoras thought that the mere statement of our belief on this point was a sufficient refutation of certain atrocious charges brought against the Christians. "We Christians "-he said to the Emperors Antoninus and Commodus-"we Christians believe and know that God night and day is present not only to all our actions but to all our words and thoughts, and that He sees the things which lie hidden in our hearts." And hence he dares to draw the conclusion that men who believe all this could not commit, even in thought, such abominable crimes as their heathen slanderers laid to their charge.

* Fabiola, chap. XVI.

Alas, it is rash to argue from faith to practice. God forbid that the real faith of our souls on this point and on many other points should be judged by our external conduct or even by our secret thoughts and feelings. But the difference between the two, the contrast between belief and conduct, can only be accounted for by the coldness of our faith and by our miserable weakness, stupidity, and cowardice. The saints were saints because they believed what we believed and acted as if they believed it, whereas we live or have often lived as if we could, at least at certain times, hide ourselves from God's sight, or as if God could overlook or forget what He sees.

The sinner who carries this forgetfulness of God's presence to the extent of freely committing grievous sins is practically a pagan, vastly worse for the time being than such enlightened pagans as Seneca (for instance) with his wise advice that we should treat with men as if God saw all, and treat with God as if men saw all. This last suggestion about using the thought or imagination of the presence of our fellow-creatures as an incentive to proper dealing with God is, I think, a very useful one and might be profitably developed. But this would lead us away from our present thesis which may be further supported by the authority of another enlightened pagan, one of the two greatest orators of classical antiquity.

Besides being an orator, Cicero wished to be a philosopher, and in one of his philosophical treatises he tells us of a certain man called Gyges who possessed a ring of such marvellous power that, when placed on a certain finger, it rendered him invisible. By means of this ring he committed many crimes with perfect impunity, murdered his king, and made himself the founder of a new line of the Kings of Lydia. Even Cicero, poor heathen as he was, says that a true philosopher, possessing such a ring, would not use it for the purpose of committing crimes with impunity, because for him it would not be enough to escape detection, since the rule of his actions is not the opinion of men but the moral fitness or unfitness of each act.

We who are not groping about in the dark but living in the light-we, thanks be to God, have a more efficacious principle to restrain us from evil than any abstract notion of the moral fitness of things. We deny the hypothesis. No Gyges' ring can render any one invisible to the eye of God. We have never for one