The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward
and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same
waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad
by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers,
perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of
Time. Who shall say that the mournful and repentant love with which the
benefactors of our race are at length regarded may not be to them, in
their new condition of being, sweet and grateful as the perfume of long-
forgotten flowers, or that our harvest-hymns of rejoicing may not reach
the ears of those who in weakness and suffering scattered the seeds of
blessing?
The history of the Edinburgh reformers is no new one; it is that of all
who seek to benefit their age by rebuking its popular crimes and exposing
its cherished errors. The truths which they told were not believed, and
for that very reason were the more needed; for it is evermore the case
that the right word when first uttered is an unpopular and denied one.
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