lamented Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Empress of India. It betokens a love and a loss felt by the strong hearts of New England and the United States. When contemplating this sudden international bereavement, the near seems afar, the distant nigh, and the tried and true seem few. The departed Queen's royal and imperial honors lose their lustre in the tomb, but her personal virtues can never be lost. Those live on in the affections of nations." (Miscellany, p. 289.) Such a tribute passing from one great continent to another, and conveying thoughts which echo down the ages, rolls away the curtain of time and the scroll of human life and measurement, until all that is spiritual and true remains the forever expression of the eternal Creator, without beginning and without end. A thousand years literally becomes as one day, and that day the everpresent reign of Christ, for Kings and Queens, and peoples alike. Across the gulf of centuries Mrs. Eddy and King Alfred clasp hands. "Holy Bible, book divine, Precious treasure thou art mine; JOHN BURTON "It is not the many who reform the world; but the few who rise superior to that Public Opinion which crucified our Lord many years ago." CHARLES KINGSLEY, MS. Lecture at Cambridge, 1866. S CHAPTER X JOHN DE WYCLIFFE (1324-1384) LOWLY, with much disturbance and turmoil, fight ings within and fear without, crude, raw, passionate human nature, rubbing off its edges against flint and bone, while at the same time solid, lasting affections were rooting themselves deeper and ever deeper into the soil, the unrecognized factors of the great nation to be were settling into their appointed boundaries, and were hearing the voices of Sinai marshalling them together under the discipline of the Law; were beginning once more to live a national life of their own. One tribe, however, was yet to land. Jacob had prophesied that "Benjamin shall raven as a wolf: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil" (Gen. 49:27). When the Normans fell upon England in 1066 seizing even the throne itself in one all-conquering onrush, Benjamin was coming home! The British had succeeded after many generations in ousting the Roman legions, but they never ejected the Norman invaders. Little Benjamin had grown into this great, strong, aggressive, warlike race, building their great castles with generous rounded arches, building too with reverent piety their massive stone churches with consummate art in every curve and line. They were hotblooded, autocratic men, carrying with them many of the characteristics of a spoilt child; but men of wealth, of destiny, and to some extent, of vision. The Nation began to consolidate. No more petty Kingdoms; no more quar |