enjoin peace to you.  Now, Christ himself, our Peace, who hath united us, keep you in the unity of the spirit and in the bond of peace; to whose protection and consolation I commend you under the wings of the Holy Ghost; that he may return you to me, and me to you in peace and with safety.  Approach now, dearest sons, and in sign of the peace and love which I have commended to you, kiss your father; and let us all pray together that the Lord may make our way prosperous, and grant us when we return to find you in the same peace, who liveth and reigneth one God, through all ages of ages.  Amen.

A SERMON AFTER ABSENCE

Behold, I have returned, my beloved sons, my joy and my crown in the Lord!  Behold!  I have returned after many labors, after a dangerous journey; I am returned to you, I am returned to your love.  This day is the day of exultation and joy, which, when I was in a foreign land, when I was struggling with the winds and with the sea, I so long desired to behold; and the Lord hath heard the desire of the poor.  O love, how sweetly thou inflamest those that are absent!  How deliciously thou feedest those that are present; and yet dost not satisfy the hungry till thou makest Jerusalem to have peace and fillest it with the flour of wheat!  This is the peace which, as you remember, I commended to you when the law of our order compelled me for a time to be separated from you; the peace which, now I have returned, I find (Thanks be to God!) among you; the peace of Christ, which, with a certain foretaste of love, feeds you in the way that shall satisfy you with the plentitude of the same love in your country.  Well, beloved brethren, all that I am, all that I have, all that I know, I offer to your profit, I devote to your advantage.  Use me as you will; spare not my labor if it can in any way serve to your benefit.  Let us return, therefore, if you please, or rather because you please, to the work which we have intermitted; and let us examine the Holy Ghost enduing us with the light of truth, the heavenly treasures which holy Isaiah has laid up under the guise of parables, when he writes that parable which the people, freed from his tyranny, shall take up against the king of Babylon.  “And it shall come to pass in the day that the Lord shall give thee rest from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve, that thou shalt take up this parable against the king of Babylon.”  Let us, therefore, understand the parable as a parable.  Not imagining that it was spoken against Nebuchadnezzar, the prince of that earthly Babylon, but rather against him who is from the North, the prince of confusion. ...  If any one of us, then, who was once set in the confusion of vices, and oppressed by the yoke of iniquity, now rejoices that he rests from his labors, and is without confusion for that which is past, and has cast off the yoke of that worst of slaveries, let him take up