A Deep Sermon-The Habitations of Mammon-Seeking Salvation-Theatrical Godliness-Pharisees-Eggs not to be laid on the Sabbath-Selfishness of the Faith of some People-Humility.

HE wisdom of Shakspere is so great and manifestly so wide searching, that it may be dissected, and each separate sentence of a

long speech full of suggestions will be found. in itself offering most satisfying food for thought. And some of these sentences have a kind of recalcitrant sharpness; that is, they kick or strike backwards as well as forwards, and hold a double amount of virtue. Nay, the backward reflection is by far the deeper and the sweeter. Thus, when Mrs. Quickly is describing the death of Sir John Falstaff, a man who lived, as we all know, after this world, but who had good qualities sufficient to excite the

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love of many of his followers, she relates that the dying knight called out 'God, God, God!' three times, and adds a sentence at once comic in its seriousness and awful in its satire-Now I, to comfort him, bid him 'a should not think of God' Was ever a deeper sermon preached than that sentence? Let us imagine the comfort of a dying man, the sands of whose life have decreased from thousands to tens, almost to units, who is forced to banish the thought of God! Further, let us regard the lesson of the life of such a man, to whom the only comfort could be a banishment of good; whose companion would quiet his last despairing cry by the presentation of a yet blanker despair. Let us look at the companion herself; faithful in her folly, and yet trying to aid her dying master by snatching from him the last chance of repentance, and plucking off the buds of hope, put forth, alas! too late, too late. Turn the sentence as we will, it is sublime in its cruel-kind satire, and is only surpassed by a heavier blow in that way from the lips of the Saviour himself, when he tells the unjust to make to themselves 'friends of the Mammon of unrighteousness; that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting or (age-enduring) habitations.' What habitations must these be?

In another great play, and equally from the mouth of a clownish person-only this one is a he-clown, not a she-clown-Shakspere gives us a second sermon in a comic sentence, with its deeply serious side. Ophelia, in

her madness, and in disobedience to that fate which is closing so darkly around the house of Hamlet, slips into a brook and drowns. But this simple death is not enough for the lower people, who must still be talking, and the very grave-diggers at her burial chatter about her as a self-slayer. A sententious, ignorant help to the chief digger, using long words, of the meaning of which he is ignorant, hits us both ways by this question-'Is she to be buried in Christian burial, that wilfully seeks her own salvation?' Of course the man means destruction; and the Church, very properly, knowing that he who has deserted his post before the fiat of the Chief Commander could be no true soldier of the Great Captain of our faith, withheld religious ceremony from suicides. They had taken such power from the hands of society, and, at war with the world and the Church, required not her ceremonies to consecrate the ground, nor her lips to express a hope of a joyful resurrection. Hence the

clown's indignation that the poor lady who was selfdrowned should be buried like others is not unnatural. Even in doing evil, says this demagogic grave-maker, we poor folks shall do as much as you. If you make fools of yourselves, why should we not be allowed to do so? Cleon, Jack Cade, and Catiline would argue just as he does. 'The more pity that great folks shall have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves, more than their even Christian.' Shakspere's clowns have