MAY 29

From wholesome labor come,

The good man reaches home,

Meets at the door the best of human blisses,

His chaste wife's welcome and dear children's kisses. Virgil. B. C. 70-19.

MAY 30.

With notes of bugle-song and drum,
With flying flags and sweet mayflowers,

And grateful hearts, again we come
To deck these soldier-graves of ours.

S. H. M. Byers.

On fame's eternal camping ground,
Their silent tents are spread,
And glory guards with solemn round
The bivouac of the dead.

Theodore O'Hara.

MAY 31.

Desertion of duty is the unpardonable sin.

Horace Mann, born May 4, 1796.

JUNE 1.

Heaven now is given away,

And God is here each day;

He sets no price on the lavish summer;
June is here for the poorest comer.

James R. Lowell, born Feb. 22, 1819.

These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of Thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring
Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love;
Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm;
And every sense, and every heart is joy.
Then comes thy glory in the Summer months,
With light and heat refulgent. Then thy sun
Shoots full perfection through the swelling year.
James Thomson, 1700-1748.

JUNE 2.

I say to thee, Do thou repeat
To the first man thou mayest meet,
In lane, highway, or open street,
That he, and we, and all men move
Under a canopy of Love;

As broad as the blue sky above.

Richard C. Trench, 1807-1886.

JUNE 3.

The Son of God reiteratively taught his disciples, “Call no man master on earth, for One is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren." The command emancipates me from all human mastership. I am free of all men, of all orders or organizations, of all hierarchies. By so much the more am I under law to God, and I am bound to all his children in equal brotherhood. The command develops into Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, breathing upon the church and the world a higher life, a holier civilization. Truman M. Post, born June 3, 1810.

JUNE 4.

Freedom is liable to abuse, but under the Divine Spirit tends to self-cure. The wounded oak by the power of life heals itself; the mutilated Parthenon goes on to dilapidation. Freedom is culture, and the free soul in immediate vision of God must grow into the likeness of the Ineffably Beautiful. T. M. Post.

JUNE 5.

How lovely is domestic happiness,

Where mind on mind and heart on heart repose
Undoubting; and the friends, whom Providence
Has brought together, sharing each with each
Their hopes, their joys, their cares, appear to live
One common life, and breathe one common will!
So beautiful is this; and where the love
Of God is added to this love of man,
Somewhat of heaven itself to earth descends.
For what is heaven, but one immortal home,
Where all are happy, loving and beloved?

Henry F. Lyte, born June 1, 1793.

JUNE 6.

Freedom and Faith are the tutelar forces of modern civilization. Of Protestantism the life-principle is spiritual liberty. All violations of this principle, calling themselves by its name, are abuses and misnomers. You may as well require me to see without my own eyes, or to hear without my own ears, as to believe without my own judgment.

T. M. Post.

JUNE 7.

Whose soul takes Untruth for its bride,
And sets himself on Evil's side,
Chooses the Black, and sure it is
His path leads down to the abyss;
But he who doth his nature feed
With stedfastness and loyal deed,
Lies open to the heavenly light,
And takes his portion with the White.

Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Of all bestialities that is the most vile and foolish and hurtful which believes there is no other life after this. Dante, 1265-1321.

Hell's mouth yawns before the feet of every man everywhere who goeth about to do evil. Dante could not find images loathsome enough to express the deformity wrought by sin. J. R. Lowell.

JUNE 8.

In the parables of Jesus the laws of nature are shown to be the analogues of the laws of the soul. The pure in heart see God by the condition of their being. Goodness is heaven, here and hereafter. Sin is hell, in this and in all worlds. Thus is Jesus the atonement, who unites law and love, faith and reason, the natural and supernatural, sinful and finite man with the holy and infinite God. Around this divinely human character, Son of God and Son of Man, Christians must one day unite. And then his sublime prayer will be fulfilled, "That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee."

James Freeman Clarke, died June 8, 1888, aged 78.