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THE LIGHT OF HOME.

Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,

And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words,
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles: children learn by such,
Love's holy earnest in a pretty play,

And get not over-early solemnised.

But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love's divine,
Which burns and hurts not, not a single bloom,-
Become aware and unafraid of Love.

Such good do mothers."

It is this which sanctifies, and crowns with success, a mother's training of her children: it is love which does it all -a love more exhaustive, more self-forgetful than the father's love; a love which years cannot wither, which tears cannot quench; a love which watches over the cradle, and smoothes the pillow under the aching head; which accompanies the daughter to her new home, and follows the son in his worldwide wanderings; which is always ready to answer any demand made upon it; which not only forgives but forgets; which gilds the darkest clouds with sunshine, and sows the roughest pathway with blossoms. It is this intense, irrepres

sible, lavish love which makes childhood so happy, and provides our manhood with so many pleasant memories; which often supplies a link between the father and his children; which so brightens and illuminates home, that to the day of our death home serves us as a beacon-light, a pharos, attracting us back into its peaceful shelter. A mother's love! what will it not bear and forbear? what can it not sweeten and irradiate? The dull lesson becomes interesting if we lisp it at the mother's knee; life's crosses seem less hard to endure if we are cheered on our way by the mother's voice. Those words of warning and counsel, which, uttered by the father, would grate upon our ear, and perhaps provoke a feeling of resentment, fall with the accent of pleasant advice from the mother's lips. She it is whose ready love enters into the boy's games, the youth's aspirations, the young man's hopes; into the achievements of mature manhood; into its failures, its disappointments, its sorrows, its successes; always prompt to soothe, to advise, to listen, to rejoice. There are confidences which bearded men pour into their mother's ears that they could not and would not reveal to the most affectionate father.

"AFTER MANY DAYS."

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We feel that there is a depth and a height in the maternal love which must always be wanting in the father's, and therefore it is at the mother's feet that we place our greenest boughs and ripest blossoms :—

Gage comes home,

And lays his last book's prodigal review
Upon his mother's knee, where, years ago,
He laid his childish spelling-book, and learned
To chirp and peck the letters from her mouth,
As young birds must.

'Well done!' she murmured then;

She will not say it now more wonderingly :
And yet the last 'Well done' will touch him more,
As catching up to-day and yesterday

In a perfect chord of love "

-a chord which resounds in sweetest music throughout our lives, so that Lord Langdale could say :-"If the whole world were put into one scale, and my mother into the other, the world would kick the beam." Happy mother! to whom we owe so much and repay so much, who gives of her best and receives of our truest; "loadstone to all hearts, and loadstar to all eyes;" the one influence whom even the hardest heart or the most debased cannot wholly resist or ignore!

And all this boundless, self-sacrificing love is needed; for sometimes the mother must sow and not reap; sometimes when she asks for bread she receives only a stone. It needs all her love to support her then; to keep up her faith and zeal and perseverance; to kindle anew the fire of love in the chilled and desolated heart. Let her not despair. She has cast her bread upon the waters, and it will be seen after many days, though not perhaps by her. It may be over her grave, and not into her bosom, that the repentant prodigal weeps the confession of his folly or his sin. Said John Randolph, the American statesman :-" I should have been an atheist if it had not been for one recollection, and that was the memory of the time when my departed mother used to take my little hand into hers, and caused me on my knees to say 'Our Father who art in heaven!"" His "departed mother :" she had passed into her rest, but her works lived after her, as good work always lives. John Newton of Olney, the author of "Cardiphonia," and, in conjunction with his friend Cowper, of the "Olney Hymns," led in his youth an evil life, and was converted from it only by the impressions which his mother's.

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THE STORY OF MONNICA.

early lessons of truth and piety had made upon his memory. Long dormant, they sprang into happy activity at last, but not until both his father and mother had departed. Every mother may find hope, as doubtless many mothers have done, in the record of the struggles of St. Augustine's mother, Monnica,1 to train her gifted son in the ways of peace and purity. His father was a man of a coarse and violent disposition, but he recognised his son's abilities, and he seems to have made considerable sacrifices to furnish him with adequate culture. Of his moral education, however, he took no heed; and it was Monnica. who endeavoured, with tears and prayers, to bring her brilliant son to the foot of the cross. Augustine turned away from her teaching, though, as he owns in his "Confessions," "his youthful heart drank in the Saviour's name with his mother's milk and kept it long and deep; and whatever learning was without that name, polished as it might be, refined and complete, could not win his whole being." He turned away from her teaching, and his feet sank deeper and deeper into the mire of sensuality. But her love pursued him into every haunt; her prayers went up for him incessantly, and her hope survived every fresh disappointment. Augustine succumbed to temptation, and became the victim of his passions; not, however, without frequent accesses of remorse, not without intervals of penitence, in which the name of Jesus recurred to his memory, and bade him think of his mother's love and piety, as the echo of an old song will recall to the mind the scenes and friends of long-parted years.

Restless and disturbed, he strove to find peace and forgetfulness in the pursuit of letters; and when this failed to satisfy his yearning soul, he abandoned himself to the enchantments of the theatre and the sports of the circus. The power of his mother's early lessons haunted him still, and he gave up his mind to metaphysical studies. The insoluble problems of the origin of evil, of the mystery of suffering, engaged his attention; he embraced the Manichæan heresy only to abandon it suddenly for the opposite extreme of Neo-Platonism, that fascinating system which endeavoured to invest the Hellenic philosophy with Christian graces. For some years he gave lectures on rhetoric, and made proselytes to his latest

1 So Bäur would have us spell it, and not “ Monica."