of the temple at Jerusalem, and was jubilant with the excitement of revelry, and joyously confident in the stability of his realm; when, in the same hour, there came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and what they wrote was, that God had numbered his kingdom, and finished it. And in that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.

A noble chamber had Pope John XXI. built for himself in the palace of Viterbo; and by the falling in of the roof he so admired, he was crushed to death. "John XXI.," writes Dean Milman, "was contemplating with too great pride the work of his own hands, and burst out into laughter; at that instant the avenging roof came down on his head." The catastrophe was held at the time to be a special judgment on a reprobate pontiff. Nebuchadnezzar's boast, and worse than Nebuchadnezzar's doom. The mention of Babylon the Great will serve, with some, to eke out a parallel.

The historian of Mexico tells us of Montezuma, while exacting from his people the homage of an adulation worthy of an oriental despot, and the profuse expenditure of whose court was a standing marvel, that "while the empire seemed towering in its most palmy and prosperous state, the canker had eaten deepest into its heart." Ruin was at hand. The hour was come, and the man; and that man was Hernando Cortès.

Significantly opens a fifth act--for a fifth act is the last-of Ben Jonson's "Sejanus," with the joyous exultations of that prosperous upstart, in the confidence of power: "Swell, swell, my joys," he exclaims,

"I did not live till now; this my first hour;

Wherein I see my thoughts reached by my power.

My roof receives me not; 'tis air I tread;
And, at each step, I feel my advanced head

Knock out a star in heaven!"

His

and so forth, with other hyperboles of frantic arrogance. soliloquy is interrupted by messengers of ill news. Destruction dogs his path; and very soon the magniloquent braggart has

to subdue his tone, and his cue is then to upbraid the higher powers whom alone he recognises :

"If you will, Destinies, that after all,

I faint now ere I touch my period,
You are but cruel."

Of constant recurrence among the commonplaces of biography are such "buts," inopportune and inevitable, as Cicero's biographer prefixes to a critical paragraph: "But while all things were proceeding very prosperously in his favour, and nothing seemed wanting to crown his success, . all his hopes and fortunes were blasted at once, by an unhappy rencounter with his old enemy Clodius."

There is a popular historical fiction in which we see the Cardinal Alberoni musing on the greatness he has achieved for Spain and for himself, only to find himself overtaken by ruin and disgrace. The rope which he has twisted so carefully, proves to be of sand. In another we see a successful adventurer at the culminating point of his success. There seems nothing wanting to him in "that supreme moment," as the phrase goes. He is in "a tumult of gratified ambition and selfish joy." "This glory and grandeur" repay a thousand-fold his patient endeavours and strenuous schemings. But at this very moment a dark shadow overlays the sunshine on his pathway; and we look on a changed countenance-“no longer full of triumph and pleasure, but ghastly pale" at a sudden but very present and very pressing sense of impending disaster. Fortuna vitrea est, tum cum splendet frangitur.

At the opening of the twelfth century all was prosperity with the Emperor Henry IV. ; his turbulent and agitated life seemed, in the words of Dean Milman, "as if it would close in an august and peaceful end." But, as an after page in the history of Latin Christianity is prompt to prove, this most secure and splendid period in the life of Henry was one calm and brilliant hour of evening before a night of utter gloom.

Columbus had just welcomed tranquillity in exchange for the troubles and dangers of his island, when intelligence arrived of the discovery of a large tract of country rich in mines. He

now anticipated the prosperous prosecution of his favourite enterprise, and was exultant at the turn of the tide. "How illusive were his hopes!" exclaims his biographer. "At this moment events were maturing which were to overwhelm him with distress, strip him of his honour, and render him comparatively a wreck for the remainder of his days." Who, the chronicler of the conquest of Granada may well ask, who can tell when to rejoice in this fluctuating world? "Every wave of prosperity has its reacting surge, and we are often overwhelmed by the very billow on which we thought to be wafted into the haven of our hopes." Et subito casu, quæ valuere,

ruunt.

Olivarez was requested by his royal master to resign, just at the moment when the death of Richelieu (1643) opened to him an almost royal road, it might seem, to success.

"O momentary grace of mortal men,

Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!
Who builds his hope in air of your fair looks,
Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast,

Ready, with every nod, to tumble down
Into the fatal bowels of the deep."

Such is the state of man, as Shakspeare's Hastings feels it. And this is the state of man, as Shakspeare's Wolsey finds it: to-day he puts forth the tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, and next day comes a frost, a killing frost, and,when he thinks, good easy man, full surely his goodness is a ripening,―nips his root, and then he falls. Shakspeare's Belarius again, will furnish us with another text, of practical application :

Then was I as a tree,

Whose boughs did bend with fruit: but in one night,
A storm, or robbery, call it what you will,

Shook down my yellow hangings, nay, my leaves,
And left me bare to weather."

And as with the pride and pomp and circumstance of life, so with life itself. Typical for all time is the fate of Lycidas :

"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of noble mind)

:

To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind fury with the abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life."

WITH

INVOCATION AND INACTION.

EXODUS xiv. 15.

TH the Red Sea close before them, and with Pharaoh and his host close behind them, what were the children of Israel to do? Was it for this that Moses had brought them out of the house of bondage, which yet had its fleshpots and creature comforts after all? What were they to do? They lifted up their eyes, and saw the sea in front, and the enemy in the rear; and then they lifted up their voice in querulous fear and expostulation. Should they go back? Then Moses lifted up his voice, and bade them stand still, and they should see a great deliverance. But the will of God was not that they should either go back, or stand still and merely look on. For "the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward." Invocation may be excellent in itself, but, as a concomitant, inaction mars it. A hallowed thing is prayer; but to pray and sit still, when the need is to go forward and push on, is the sign or stigma. of feeble folk.

When Nelson told the King of Naples, in plain terms, that he had his choice-either to advance, trusting to God for His blessing on a just cause, and prepared to die sword in hand; or to remain quiet, and be kicked out of his kingdom; the king made answer that he would go on, and trust in God and Nelson. Of the same stuff as Nelson, but his superiors in moral character and in practical recognition of Him that is Holy, Holy, Holy, as well as Lord God Almighty, were those early English navigators, characterized by a modern pen as “indomitable God-fearing men, whose life was one great liturgy."

The ice was strong, but God was stronger," says one of Frobisher's men, after grinding a night and a day among the icebergs; not waiting for God to come down and split them, but toiling through the long hours, himself and the rest fending off the vessel with poles and planks, with death glaring at them out of the rocks, and so saving themselves and it. We read in Turell's Life of Dr. Benjamin Colman, "that reverend father in our New England Israel," as Mr. Lowell calls him, that when the vessel in which he had taken passage for England was attacked by a French privateer, he "fought like a philosopher and a Christian, and prayed all the while he charged and fired." His the practice was, if not on his lips the maxim, to pray to God and keep his powder dry. It is expressly noted of the Maid of Orleans, in the Procès on record, that while she rather evaded the question of resorting to miraculous aids and appliances, and of affecting supernatural power, she "used the Gallic proverb, Ayde-toi, Dieu te aydera."

"In daily toil, in deadly fight,

God's chosen found their time to pray;
And still He loves the brave and strong,
Who scorn to starve, and strive with wrong,
To mend it, if they may."

Forcible is the portrait drawn in a recent work of fiction, of a man now steeped in moral degradation, who had once tried to be honest, and prayed to God to prosper his honesty; but then he only tried to do right in a spasmodic, fitful kind of way, and expected his prayers to be granted as soon as uttered, and was indignant with a Providence that seemed regardless of his entreaties.

Bentley is held to have happily ridiculed the helpless Chorus of Greek tragedy, who, when a deed of violence was to be acted, instead of interfering to prevent the atrocity to which the perpetrator had made them privy, could only, by the rules of the theatre, exhaust their sorrow and surprise in dithyrambics. He burlesqued this characteristic by introducing into "The Wishes" a Chorus after the manner of the ancient Greeks, who are informed by one of the dramatis persona, that a madman