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A story is told, in a little poem by Francis Browne, of a pilgrim band, sitting by the shore of the sea and recounting their losses, while the evening waned away from cliff and bay, and the strong tides went out with weary moan. One spoke with quivering lips of a ship that went down into the deep, with all his household, another of a still wilder woe for a fair young face lost long before in the darker depths of a great town. Some mourned the sweet memories of a lost youth. One looked away to the west, with eyes that would not rest, for far off hills, where all his joys had been. Some talked of vanished gold, some told of proud honors gone, some of friends proved faithless, and one of a green grave beside a foreign wave, that made him sit lonely on the shore.
“But when their tales were done,
There spake among them one,
A stranger seeming from all sorrow free:
‘Sad losses have ye met,
But mine is heavier yet,
For a believing heart hath gone from me.’
“‘‘Alas!’ These pilgrims said,
‘For the living and the dead,
For fortune’s cruelty, for love’s sore cross,
For the wrecks of land and sea;
But, howe’er it came to thee,
Thine, stranger, is life’s last and heaviest loss.’”
We stand in tearful pity beside those who have lost money or friends, or have suffered from life’s other adversities; but there are none whom we should pity like those who have put away from them the precious faith of their early years; who believe no more in a personal, loving God. The loss of a believing heart is life’s sorest loss.