London to John O' Groat's. 155 



the series of negatives, a pure and simple prohibition 

 of idolatry. No reward of keeping this first, great 

 law, reaching beyond the boundary of a temporal con- 

 dition, was promised at its giving out. With the 

 headstrong passions, lusts, appetites, and tempers of 

 flesh and blood bridled and bitted by these restrictions, 

 and with no motives to obedience beyond the awards 

 of a short life on earth, the human soul groped its way 

 through twenty centuries after the Revelation of Sinai, 

 feeling for the immortality which was not yet revealed 

 to it, even " as through a glass darkly." Here and 

 there, but thinly scattered through the ages, divinely 

 illumined men caught, through the parting seams of 

 the veil, a transient glimpse and ray of the life to come. 

 Here and there, obscurely and hesitatingly, they refer 

 to this vision of their faith. Here and there we seem 

 to see a hope climbing up out of a good man's heart 

 into the pathless mystery of a future existence, and 

 bringing back the fragment of a leaf which it believes 

 must have grown on one of the trees of life immortal. 

 Moses, Job, David, and Isaiah give us utterances that 

 savor of this belief; but they leave us in the dark in 

 reference to its influence upon their lives. "We cannot 

 glean, from these incidental expressions, whether it 

 brought them any steady comfort, or sensibly affected 

 their happiness. 



