of buried love; you can tell them they shall meet their departed kindred in a better home.  Oh, clasp this promise to your aching heart; treasure it up as a pearl of great price.  Your departed children are not lost to you; and their death to them is great gain.  They are not lost, but only sent before.  “The Lord, has taken them away.”  With these views of death before you, and with the moral instructions they afford, you cannot but feel that your children, though absent from you in body, are with you in spirit,—­are still living with you in your household, and are among that spirit-throng which ever press around you, to bear you up lest you dash your foot against a stone.  Such were the feelings of the Christian father, as expressed in the following touching lines:—­

    “I cannot make him dead! 
    When passing by his bed,
  So long watched over with parental care,
    My spirit and my eye
    Seek it inquiringly,
  Before the thought comes that—­he is not there!

  “When at the day’s calm close
    Before we seek repose,
  I’m with his mother, offering up our prayer,
    Whate’er I may be saying,
    I am, in spirit, praying
  For our boy’s spirit, though—­he is not there!

    “Not there?  Where, then, is he? 
    The form I used to see
  Was but the raiment that he used to wear. 
    The grave, that now doth press
    Upon that cast-off dress,
  Is but his wardrobe locked;—­he is not there!

    “He lives!  In all the past
    He lives; nor, to the last,
  Of seeing him again will I despair;
    In dreams I see him now,
    And on his angel brow,
  I see it written, ‘Thou shalt see me there!’

    “Yes, we all live to God! 
    Father, thy chastening rod
  So help us, thine afflicted ones, to bear,
    That in the spirit-land,
    Meeting at thy right hand,
  ’Twill he our heaven to find that—­he is there!”

From this view of the educational principle involved in all our bereavements, we may easily infer that God designs to benefit us by them.  There is an actual usefulness in all the bereavements of the Christian home.  They are but the discipline of a Father’s hand and the ministration of a Father’s love.  Though His face may wear a dark frown, or be hid behind the tempest-cloud, and His rod may be laid heavily upon you, yet you are not warranted to believe that no sweet is in the bitter cup you drink, that no light shines behind the cloud, or that no good dwells in the bursting storm around you.  The present may indeed he dark; but the future will be bright and laden with a Father’s blessing.  The smile will succeed the frown; the balm will follow the rod.  The good seed will be sown after the deep furrows are made.  “No chastening for the present seemeth joyous, but grievous, yet it worketh out a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory to them that are exercised thereby.”  The memory that lingers around the grave of our loved ones, is sad and tearful.  The stricken heart heaves with emotions too big for utterance, when we hear no more the sound of their accustomed footsteps upon the threshold of our door.  Oh, the cup of bereavement is then bitter, its hour dark, and the pall of desolation hangs heavily around our hearts and homes.