difficult." And if we are to succeed, we must have the strength that comes from communion with God.

"O God, our spirits, unassisted,
Must unsuccessful be.

Whoever hath the world resisted
Except by help of Thee?
But, saved by a divine alliance,
From terrors of defeat,
Unvauntingly, yet with defiance,
One man the world may meet.

My soul is for a crown aspiring-
The crown of righteousness;
My soul is for truth inquiring-
For God, and nothing less.
Sin, sorrow, and the world, conspiring,
Assault me, and I bleed.

Tired am I yet, through love, untiring,

I know I shall succeed."

There is this for your consolation. Indifference to right and truth would save you trouble, but would assuredly degrade your nature; whereas the pain you experience in striving to live a manly life is noble and

will end in eternal joy.

elevating in itself, and Do not sell your birth

right for a mess of pottage.

What shall it profit

you if you gain the whole world, and lose yourself? Sirs! I beseech you, for your own sakes, for Christ's sake, for God's sake, be men!

I21

The Greatness of Man.

"When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For" (or rather but) "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet." -PSALM viii. 3-6.

WHEN

WHEN the Psalmist looked up to the heavens he was at first overwhelmed with a sense of his own littleness. The sun, moon, and stars appeared to him so majestic, that he said, "Lord, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?" Man seemed in comparison insignificant and unworthy of the divine regard. But, on second thoughts, David bethought himself that this was an entire misconception of the matter, and that man could not be inferior to the heavens; for God had, in point of fact, made him only a little lower than the angels, than the Elohim is the word in the

Hebrew. This term, in the Elohistic portion of
the Pentateuch, is applied to the Almighty in-
stead of the term Jehovah. God had made man,
we may therefore read, a little lower than Him-
self; had crowned him with glory and honour;
had given him dominion over the works of His
hands, and had put all things under his feet.
The idea suggested by our text is this-

"On earth there is nothing great but man:
In man there is nothing great but mind."

In other words, true greatness consists, not in weight or extension, but in intellectual power and moral worth. Instead of being of less value than the heavens, man is of infinitely more value than they, for he is but a little lower than the Elohim.

We need to be retaught this lesson.

The progress of science has a constantly increasing tendency to make us underrate our manhood. Our relations to time and space seem so paltry, when we compare them with those of the material world. If the Psalmist were overawed by the heavens, much more must they overawe thoughtful and imaginative minds in our own day. There are but 5932 stars visible to the naked eye, and David did not even

suspect the existence of any others. His view of their origin was that they were suddenly called into existence on a certain Thursday, two thousand years before the time of Noah. They were intended, he thought (the whole 5932 of them), to adorn his firmament or to light up his roads. The sun and moon he probably considered to be no larger than Palestine, and not more than 50 or 100 miles distant. How different are our heavens from his! Rosse's telescope has brought to view over 20,000,000 of stars. We know that many of these are hundreds of times greater than our own sun, and that most of them (like him) have planets revolving around them. We know that the volume of the sun is 1 million times as large as that of the earth. We know it is so far distant, that if we could travel towards it day and night at the rate of 60 miles an hour, it could not be reached in less than 180 years. know that Neptune is 30 times as far away from the sun as we are, and that therefore it would take any one, at the same rate, over 5400 years to traverse the intervening space. We know that some of the nearest fixed stars are more than 45 billions (i.e., millions of millions) of miles away from us, so that if we

We

travelled as before 60 miles an hour, it would require nearly 90,000,000 of years to perform the journey. We know that the so-called fixed stars are not really at rest, but that they are moving in orbits hundreds of millions of miles in diameter, which enormous orbits, owing to the distance, appear to us like mere mathematical points. It seems probable enough that stars exist in such far-off tracts of space, that their light, though travelling as it must do at the rate of 192,000 miles per second, has not yet reached us; and when it comes it will reveal, as Sir John Herschel said, not the actual condition of those stars at the time, but the state in which they were ages and ages before.

Again, the duration of the material universe in time is no less stupendous than its extension in space. There is every reason to believe that myriads of ages ago our earth was a rotating mass of glowing gas; that it gradually cooled into the liquid state; that at last the outside crust became solid, the inside only remaining molten; and that after millions of years this internal source of the earth's surface-heat will be exhausted, in consequence of which it will be no longer capable of maintaining animal or even vegetable life.

Then," says Mr R. A. Proctor, "her