the visions of their waking hours. They see him again; they know that he is not gone; he is beside them still.
But for us, who live in a calmer age, and see with scientific eyes, there is no such comfort. Not to us can the bodily forms of those who have gone before us to the grave appear again in all the loveliness of life. In the first shock of our bereavement we may indeed indulge in some such visionary hope; but as day after day passes by and leaves us in a solitude that does but deepen with the lapse of time, we learn to understand only too well that we are bereft forever. Hope gradually dwindling to a fainter and fainter remnant, is crushed at last by the miserable certainty of profound despair. Yet even then, the mind of man refuses to accept its fate. The scene of the reunion, which we cannot but so ardently desire, is postponed to another season and to a better world. Many are they to whom this final hope is an enduring consolation, But if even that should fail us in the hour of darkness, as the more primitive and simpler hope failed before it; if here again emotion is reluctantly compelled to yield to reason; then there is still one refuge in despondency, and a refuge of which we can never be deprived. It is the thought that death, so cruel now, will one day visit us with a kinder touch; and that the tomb, which already holds the nearest and the dearest within its grasp, will open to receive us also in our turn to its everlasting peace.
Subdivision 3.—The Ideal Jesus.
The Gospel attributed by the current legend to St. John differs from the other three Gospels in almost every respect in which difference is possible. The events recorded are different. The order of events is different. The conversations of Jesus are different. His sermons are different. His opinions are different. The theories of the writer about him are different. Were it not for the name and a few leading incidents, we should be compelled to say that the subject of the biography himself is different. A more conspicuous unlikeness than that of the synoptical to the Johannine Jesus it is not easy to conceive in two narratives which depict the same hero. In the synoptical Gospels Jesus is plain, direct, easy of comprehension, and fond
