"AUGUSTINE was walking one morning by the seashore, meditating on the doctrine of the Trinity. Three holy persons, thought he, in the Godhead, equal in wisdom, equal in power, and equal in glory; yet not three Gods, - only one! And, as he tried in vain to understand it, he saw before him on the shore a little child, holding in its hand a colored sea-shell, scooping a hole in the sand, running to the waves, filling it with water, returning to the hole, and emptying it. 'What are you doing, child?' said Augustine. I am going,' said the child, 'to pour the sea into this hole!' Ah! thought Augustine, it is the very thing I have been trying to do, standing on the shore of time, by the ocean of the infinite and eternal Godhead, and trying to comprehend that Godhead with my little mind! And the love of Jesus is such an unsearchable ocean, without bottom or bounds, therefore wonder and adore, but think not to discover the cause of the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge.'" Woman at the Cross. WOMAN is indebted to the cross, if possible, more deeply than man. Everywhere that the cross has no power, she is in an inferior condition, and is a neglected creature. But, where the religion of the cross comes, it lifts her up to equality with man, as his helper and friend. THE CROSS SANCTIFIED TO MOTHERS. "The fate of a child," said the first Napoleon, "is always the mother." No other hand is work of his. gentle, and at the same time strong enough for this work; no aptness and patience, no skill and ingenuity and tenderness, are like hers. Hence it is that she, and no one else, can make her Ichild what she would have it. that the mother makes the man. Hence it is seek the proof of this? Turn over the pages of history: examine the annals of the church, and you will find, in the language of another, that, "as a general rule, superior men are all the children of their mother;" that great men are the children of great mothers. Who has ever read the story of Thermopyla without feeling that the Spartan mother formed the Spartan Leonidas? or, as we see the Curtius take the fatal leap, is it not a sufficient explanation of his heroic self-devotion to say he is the son of a Roman matron? Who gave Samuel and Augustine to the church of God? The faithful Hannah and the loving, humble, patient Monica. And so, perhaps, I might say that almost every noble soul that has led forward or lifted up the race has been inspired with each patriotic and holy aspiration, and furnished with faith and strength for each virtuous and noble deed, by the love and patience and fortitude. of some heroic Spartan, or Roman, or, more than either, some Christian mother. "Not long since," says the late Dr. Monod, "in a pastoral conference, where were assembled one hundred and twenty American pastors, united in a common faith, each one was invited to relate the human cause to which he attributed, under the divine blessing, the change of his heart; and, out of those one hundred and twenty, more than one hundred gave the honor to their mother." Not long since, the Rev. Dr. Leland of South Carolina stated, at a prayer-meeting at Saratoga Springs, "that, of one hundred students in the Theological Seminary at Columbia, he had ascertained, by personal inquiry, that ninety-nine received their first religious impressions from pious mothers." Says a French writer, "Of sixty-nine monarchs who have worn the French crown, only three have loved the people; and all those three were reared by their mothers, without the intervention of pedagogues. St. Louis was trained |