HIDDEN LIFE: MEMORIALS OF JOHN WHITMORE WINSLOW, UNDERGRADUATE OF TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN. BY HIS FATHER, OCTAVIUS WINSLOW, D.D. INCUMBENT OF EMMANUEL CHURCH, BRIGHTON. BIL OF THE "He walked with God; and he was not: for God oo Fifth Edition. MECA 700 BO LONDON: JOHN F. SHAW AND CO., 48, PATERNOSTER ROW, AND 27, SOUTHAMPTON ROW. BRIGHTON : NOYES AND FRIEND, 77, WESTERN ROAD. 1872. 210. m 251. PREFACE. THE writer trusts that in compiling the present volume he is not putting together again the pieces of an idol which God had shattered; in other words, reinstating in its lonely shrine the object of a parental affection too fond, and of a father's hope too ambitious. Severe, yet wise and loving, has been the discipline by which God has sought to chasten and subdue the heart's idolatry. That heart, sincere and undivided, He will have. worthy, most worthy, is He of affection's deepest, supremest pulse. Were every being and every object in the universe annihilated but JESUS, He were enough to fill the soul with happiness, and eternity with admiration and praise. And And yet we may love the dead! "The love that survives the tomb," remarks a distinguished American writer,* "is one of the noblest attributes * Irving. of the soul." True, it is not an unmixed feeling. It has its element of sadness, its dash of woe,-its sigh,-its tear. Nevertheless, when the first overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into quiet submission,-when the sudden shock and convulsed agony is softened into pensive meditation on all that the object we loved was in the day of its loveliness, there is then a feeling we would not exchange for the world's most joyous revelry. And when we repair to the tomb to weep, there comes from it a voice sweeter than the sweetest song; and we turn from the charm of the living and find ourselves more at home in the hallowed remembrance of, and in sacred communion with, the blessed dead! Not, then, to reinspire an undue affection, is the object of these pages, but to embalm a loved and cherished memory in a Memorial,' that shall present to those of his own age and position the moral portrait of a life which, though hidden and brief, may, in its unveiling, attract and fix a restless eye,-raising it from its contemplation of the imperfect copy to a yet higher admiration and love of the divine and peerless Original. Thus may God, in a way that transcends all human forethought, still employ His young servant in a mission of saving mercy to those for whose spiritual well-being he cultivated the talents of his youth, and to whom he hoped to dedicate the labours and service of his life. Thoughts, not heroic deeds; feelings, and not varied and stirring incident, are all that must be expected in a life so shaded, studious and transient as was his. The writer cannot trust himself to advert to the stroke which removed from him in a moment a son so lovely, promising, and dear. Nature sankgrace upheld-or the mind that has traced these pages had been a ruin and a blank. He can testify —and it is his duty as his privilege so to do-that JESUS is all-sufficient for life's heaviest calamity, for the heart's deepest woe. Human sympathy, sanctified and chastened by divine grace, has been in the hour of unutterable anguish, a source of exquisite soothing. But for the tide which flowed in upon his bereaved home from well-nigh each quarter of the globe, and from all sections of Christ's Church, he could scarcely have believed that so much real affection, and that so much tender sympathy still entwined itself around our fallen and ruined humanity. He gladly avails himself of this occasion of expressing to his beloved friends, -those whom he personally knows and those |