ST. FRANCIS PREACHING TO SPARROWS. 321 tribe, but one of the most universally known; and if it have, of all creatures, the least dread of man, it certainly is of least service to him. Most creatures give to man a very wide berth, and keep out of his way; the sparrow goes wherever man goes; it is a little fighting John Bull of a bird. Build a new farm in the most lonely place, or in any recent clearing or enclosure, and there the sparrow finds its home, and builds its nest. If men put up a furnace, it builds somewhere about it, unmindful of the noise; it knows no difference in the rank of its residences. The cock sparrow is the most impudent of birds, he is not a bird of fine sensibilities, he has been called "Jack sparrow." Mary Howitt, in her most pleasant book of verses on "Birds and Flowers," speaks of the sparrow as— "The bully of his tribe-to all beyond The gipsy, beggar, knave, and vagabond! But in the same piece she says "I walk in cities, 'mong the human herds, And then I think of birds: I walk in woods among the birds, and then I think of men! "Tis quite impossible in one or other To walk and see not-man and bird are brother." It is to be supposed that it is the very insignificance of this little. creature which has given to it its place in the Bible, as our Lord says, "Not a sparrow falls to the ground without your Father; ye are of more value than many sparrows;" a word which our great poet renders— "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow." And as James Montgomery, in that beautiful poetic aviary, in which almost every kind of bird finds its place in a poetical, proverbial parable, says 666 Sparrow, the gun is levelled: quit that wall,''Without the will of Heaven I cannot fall!"" So much for the New Testament; and for the Old we are told, "The sparrow hath found a house for herself, even Thine altars, O Lord of Hosts!" Perhaps our readers are not likely to forget how the beautiful St. Francis of Assisi-who really seemed to keep up a wonderful understanding with all the creatures, especially with birds-seemed to have an extraordinary liking for these little sparrows and swallows. That must have been a marvellous sight which the biographers of the saint recite to us, when on one occasion he saw a number of sparrows collected, and he went up to them and said, "My brethren, listen to the word of God; you have great reason to praise your Creator, He covered you with feathers, He gave you wings wherewith to fly, and placed you in the air where the breathing is so pure, and He provides you with everything that is necessary without giving you much trouble." And while he was Y 322 THE ATLAR A CHURCH HOME, NOT THE BUTTRESS. thus speaking and saying other similar things, the birds remained where they were, turning towards him; and those who were perched on the branches of the trees, bending their heads as if to listen to what he said; it was very curious to notice how they stretched their necks and opened their beaks, and looked anxiously at the preacher. There is a great deal in the life of St. Francis about his preaching to birds. Once, when he was preaching, the swallows kept up such a noise that he could not make himself heard, so he turned to them and said, "Swallows, my dear sisters, you have made yourselves heard long enough, it is my turn to speak now. Listen to the word of God, which I preach, and keep silence.” And so they did; they seemed to understand what he said, and were quite quiet until the end of the sermon, which, indeed, we are not surprised to learn, produced a great effect upon the audience. But we must say no more about this droll saint, or we shall make our readers angry by detaining them with such trivialities. "Even Thine altars." There is a comfortable refuge even for common things. The manner of some is to speak about the Altar and the Church, but not, like the sparrow, to find "a rest" in the House. Lord Eldon was one of the last of the mighty Conservatives of all things belonging to Church and State; he would not have permitted any irreverent hand to touch a brick of the Church, but he never went to church. Somebody called him a pillar of the Church. "No," he said, "not a pillar, a pillar is inside, I never go inside of a church if I can help it; I am a buttress, a buttress is outside." This wicked old Lord Chancellor reminds us of Falstaff, who had forgotten what the inside of a church was like; but the home of the sparrow is not in the buttresses but in the altar. Surely from the little bird the Bible intended we should find a lesson, not to blame God so much. How often people stay away from church because, like Lord Eldon, they become surly, as quarrelling with Providence, and thinking that God might have known better, or done better. PROVERBS AND PARABLES CONCERNING SUNDAY, AND KEEPING THE SABBATH. CONCER ONCERNING the Sabbath there is surely no story more strange than that which Thomas Carlyle reproduces, after his own fashion, from the Introduction to "Sale's Koran;" but Thomas Carlyle shall tell the story himself. "Perhaps few narratives in history or mythology are more significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake, and having forgotten, as we are all prone to do, the inner facts of nature, and taken up with the falsities and outer semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions, verging indeed to a certain far deeper lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung 'remedial measures not a few. But no; the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses ; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, that probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore. "Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all changed into apes;' sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner; gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole universe now a most indisputable humbug. "The universe has become a humbug to these apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour; only, I believe, every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit, with their wizzened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as apes may, looking out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky twilight and undecipherable disordered dusk of things, wholly an uncertainty, unintelligibility, they and it, and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or mew: truest, tragicalest humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls, 324 DIES LUCIS.-REGINA DIERUM. and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls. "Didst thou never, O traveller, fall in with parties of this tribe? they are grown somewhat numerous in our day." This, according to Thomas Carlyle, is a pretty outcome of disregarding the Sabbath, and a strange transformation of its service. "By keeping a Sabbath," says the great Bishop Horsley, "we acknowledge a God, and declare that we are not atheists; by keeping one day in seven, we protest against idolatry, and acknowledge that God who in the beginning made the heavens and the earth; and by keeping our Sabbath on the first day of the week, we protest against Judaism, and acknowledge that God who, having made the world, sent His only begotten Son to redeem mankind. The observance, therefore, of the Sunday in the Christian Church is a public weekly assertion of the first two articles of the Christian creed-the belief in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord." Wherever the Gospel goes, it creates a Sabbath. This day was anciently called Dies Lucis, the day of light; also Regina Dierum, the queen of days; and it is said that in the primitive Church the question was put to young converts, Dominicum servasti? Hast thou kept the Lord's day? And the answer was, "I am a Christian; how can I then omit it?" Without doubt this day, wherever Christianity goes, marks the periodical cessation of toil. It is called in law dies non, a day on which no business is transacted, Sabbath day, the rest day. A recent volume of the Sunday at Home gave a pleasing pictorial representation of the Sabbath in many and varied regions of the globe-in the wild wilderness, on the waste of the sea, among the mountains of Switzerland, among the forests of Madagascar, as well as in our English parishes and homes. As the sun makes its circuit (using popular, not scientific phrase), or as the earth moves in its orbit, and day travels round the world, so the Sabbath day, even while its evening shadows are creeping over one clime, is mounting into morning or travelling into meridian noon in another. That which has been said of the flag of England, that on its dominion the sun never sets, is in an infinitely higher sense true of the Sabbath. It is the sign of an empire upon which the sun never sets; "from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, the Lord's name is to be praised." In Old Testament times the Lord said, by His prophet Ezekiel, "Moreover also I gave them my Sabbaths to be a sign between me and them;" and now the Christian Sabbath, the Lord's day, is a sign of the better covenant. Wherever this truth travels, it leaves the institution of the Sabbath like a celestial sign behind it. The Sabbath is also like those great heavenly lights which are appointed "for signs and for seasons, for days and for ears." And, just as an institution is the most certain method of commemorating an event-setting WHAT THE POETS SAY ABOUT SUNDAY. 325 up a stone, planting a tree, rearing a building; so, here, the setting apart a day, the stamping on a day an inscription, engraving it, as it were, with a circumstance, calls the mind back to the event. Thus the Sabbath, through all ages and through all countries where Bible light has travelled, becomes a beautiful possession and a beautiful promise, a memory and a hope. As Joshua Sylvester, in his truly admirable translation of Du Bartas's "Divine Weeks," has it : "God would this Sabbath should a figure be Of the blest Sabbath of Eternity. 'Tis the grand jubilee, the feast of feasts, Both Henry Vaughan and George Herbert have, in their own fanciful and quaint, but still very sweet way, said some beautiful things about the Sabbath. The first, Henry Vaughan, speaks of Sabbath days as the "Church's love feasts," and "God's walking hour in the cool of the day." His whole piece is a succession of such epithets : Eternity in time; the steps by which We climb above all ages; lamps that light Man through this heap of dark days; and the rich And full redemption of the whole week's flight." And George Herbert, with that odd beauty so peculiar to his verse, speaking of the change effected in the Sabbath by its transference from the seventh to the first day of the week, likens it to Samson's feat with the gates of Gaza : "The rest of our creation Our great Redeemer did remove With the same shake which, at His passion, Did th' earth and all things with it move. As Samson bore the doors away, Christ's hands, though nailed, wrought our salvation, And did unhinge that day." There is a very pretty usage in Moscow; indeed, we believe it is general throughout the Greek Church; it is the salutation wherewith. neighbours and friends greet each other on Easter morning. "Christ is risen!" says one to the other; and the response is, "Christ is risen indeed!" What the Russians say to each other on Easter morning is what the institution of the Sabbath, as we celebrate it on the first day of the week, has been saying through all the ages since its institution, and in all the countries where it has been observed. It has come to be, not merely the day of rest, but, if we can trust the intention and the signific |