Connecticut western news., 1894-03-01

your child went? Well, you say, "if
 she had lived she would have been 10
 years old now, or 20 or 80 years" But
 does not that infant face still have ten
 der supremacy over your entire nature?
 During many an eventide does it not
 look at you? In your dreams do you not
 see it2 What a sanctitying, hallowing
 influence it has been in your lifel You
 can say in the words of the D; ct, Bet
 ter to have loved and lost than never to
 have loved at all. Or 1t may have
 been a sisters face. Perhaps she was
 the invalid of the family. Perhaps she
 never went out except on very clear
 days, and then she had to be carried
 down the stairs to the piazza or for
 short ride. but she was so patient and
 cheerful under it all. As that face looks
 at you through the years with what an
 elevated and heavenly emotion you are
 filled. Or was 1t fathers face? The
 storms of life had somewhat roughened
 it. A good deal of the brightness of
 the eye had been quenched, and the ear
 was turned with the hand behind 1t in
 order to hear at all. But you remember
 that face so vividly that if you were an
 artist you could put it on canvas. and
 it would mean to you more than any
 face that Rembrandt ever sketched.
 That face, though long ago yelled from
 human sight, is as plain in your memory
 as though you this moment saw it mov-
 ing gently forward and backward in the
 rocking chair by the stove in the old
 farmhouse. Or was it your mothers
 fo ia
 homely to her boys and girls. It is
 "Madonna" in the picture gallery of the
 memory. What sympathetic face it
 wasi Did you ever have joy and that
 face did not respond to it? Did you ever
 have griet and no tears trickled down that maternal cheek? Did you ever do bad thing and shadow did not cross it? Oh, 1t was a sweet facei The spec
 tacles with large, round glasses through which she looked at you, how sscredly they have been kept in bureau or closet! Your mothers face, your mothers
 smile, your mothers tears. What an overpowering memoryi Though you have come on to midlife or old age. how you would like just once more to bury your face in her lap and have a good cryi
 But can tell you of a more sympa- thetic and more tender and more loving face than any of the faces 1 have men, toned. "No, you cannot" says some one. I can, and will. It is the face ot Jesus Christ as he was on earth and is now in heaven. When preparing my lifeof Christ, entitled From Manager @l~ | leries and portfolios of the world to find picture of our Saviour's face that might be most expressive, and l saw 1t as Francesca Francia painted it in the sixteenth century, and as the emerald intaglio of the sixth century I resented | it. and as fresco in the catacombs near Rome preserved it, and as Leonardo d; Vinci showed it in The Last Supper, and I looked in the Louvre, and tn, Luxembourg, and the Vatican, and tho | Dresden, and the Berlin, and Neapolitan
 and London galleries for the most in. | spring face of Christ, and many of tho | presentations were wonderful for pathos and majesty and power and execution, but although I selected that by Ary l Scheffer as in some respects the most expressive felt as we all feel-that our l Christ has never yet been presented either in sculpture or painting. and that we will have to wait until we rise
 to the upper palace, where we shall see him as be is.
 What gentle face it must have been to induce the babes to struggle out of | their mothers arms into his arms! What an expressive face it must have been when one reproving look of it
 threw stalwart Peter into fit of tearsl What pleading face it must have been to lead the psalmist in prayer to say | of it, Look upon the face of thine | anointedr" What a sympathetic face 1t | must have been to encourage the sick woman who was beyond any help from the doctors to touch the hem of his gar menti What a suffering face 1t must have been when suspended on the per | pendicular and horizontal pieces of the
 wood of martyrdom, and his antagonists ! slapped the pallid cheek with their | rough hands and befouled it with the saliva of their blasphenous lips. What a tremendous face it must have been to | lead St. John to describe it in the com ing judgment as scattering the universe wien he says, From whose face the
 earth and the heaven fled away"
 | THE FACE oMNIPoTENT.
 O Christi Once the Nazarene, but now the celestiali Once of cross, but now of thronel Once crowned with | stinging bramble, but now coroneted | with the jewels of ransomed empires! | Turn on us thy pardoning face and for give us, thy sympathetic face and con- | sole us, thy suffering face and have thy atonement avail for us, thy omnipotent
 face and rescue us. Oh, what facel So
 scared, so lacerated, so resplendent, so
 overwhelmingly glorious that the sera- | phim put wing to wing and with their | conjoined pinions keep off some of the
 luster that is too mighty even for eyes | cherubic or angelic, and yet this morn | ing turning upon us with a sheathed !, splendor like that with which he ap- | peared when he said to the mothers
 bashful about presenting their children,
 Suffer them to come;" and to the poor waif of the street, Neither do con- | demn thee" and to the eyes of the | blind beggar of the wayside, "Be open | ed. think my brother John, the re-
 turned foreign missionary, dying sum-
 mer before last at Bound Brook, caught glimpse of that face of Christ when
 in his dying hour my brother said, ''l
 shall be satisfied when I awake in his | likeness. And now unto him that
 loved us and washed us from our sins
 in his own blood and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father, to
 him be glory and dominion for ever and
 ever. Amen and aneni Amen and
 ameni