property in such a way that, while the outside is being built, the inside will be built also. Is it hard work, and is the remuneration long delayed? Patience and meekness! Is it work among selfish men? Love and beneficence! Is it work that seems to require great outlay, and to promise little income? Disinterestedness! Is it work such that you have to maintain your steadfastness, often and often, by a martyr spirit for the truth? Long-suffering! These are the very schools in which God works out moral qualities in you. No man works out his piety on Sunday and at church. Here is where you get your chart directed and your compass pointed, here is where you get your lesson; but in your daily business God works out your moral qualities. For the way to use this world is to use it so as to work out those qualities, so as to accumulate a store of Christian manliness in us. We are to employ the material agencies by which we are surrounded so that while we are serving the outward life it shall be serving us a great deal more. The man that works right outwardly is the man that is built up inwardly; just as he that teaches children is taught more than he teaches. For I think our children bring us up more than we do them. And all parents that think what their children have done for them must feel that in some sense the father and mother should bow down to the children. If serve the instrument well, it will serve you well; and no man can serve this life well unless by it he hopes to be served in the life to come. JANUARY 18: EVENING. Whoso offereth praise glorifieth me.-Psalm 1., 23. you How shall a man praise God who seems to himself to be in continuous trouble? Look at the history of David, and see how you will do it. I think some of the most wondrous of his Psalms are those that begin in supplication. He says, for instance, "All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me; all mine enemies are upon me; dost thou not care for me?" and then, having exhausted the language of supplication, he breaks out into triumph, and says, "I will praise thee." It seems as though there rose up over the horizon to him the bright star of Christ, and as though the light of it kindled in his soul gladness and peace that he could not refrain from giving expression to. You will find that in some of the psalms the soul begins in a minor key, and by-and-by rises to the major key; and then flies away, and sings as it flies. Now, if a man is in trouble, let him go to God in his trouble till he gets a sense of the divine loving, pitying, sympathetic nature, and see if there does not spring up in him a spirit of praise. And whenever you feel an impulse to praise, give it wings. Do not lose a chance to praise. It is precious to the soul. JANUARY 19: MORNING. When he maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them: he forgetteth not the cry of the humble.-Psalm ix., 12. ANSWERING does not always stand next door to petition. Prayers, however, are never forgotten when they go up before the faithful One. Long after we have forgotten them, God remembers them. Prayers are seeds; and as air-plants root themselves up in trees, and then grow by reaching down toward the earth, so prayers, methinks, root themselves up in heaven, and then grow down toward us. They sometimes have a long growth before they reach us and blossom, but they do it sooner or later. Of the thousands and thousands of petitions uttered by God's people, some are answered the same day, some the same week, some the same month, and some the same year in which they are uttered; and some are not answered till years pass after their utterance. Blessed be God that it should be so. It indicates that the divine administration is not a meagre administration. "I will, therefore, that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting." JANUARY 19: EVENING. There is but a step between me and death.—1 Sam. xx., 3. SOMETIMES we long to die, because we are tired of our living; sometimes we are willing to die, as we say, because it will be the end of sin; sometimes we wish to die because the heart calls out with unutterable longing for those who have gone before; sometimes we wish to die because we are filled with a not unnatural nor unheroic fervor, and would fain walk among the called, the sons of God. How many of us feel that heaven is sweet, because at last it will bring the sweetness and summer of love. How many of us mourn over our wants, and weep in contrition day by day because we are so wanting in the spirit of love and of Christ. How many of us wish for death, because at last it will bring us into that which our soul most desires, more than honor, riches, or all that the world can give. Time is short, and but a veil separates you from the world to come. You stand perhaps so near that, if you knew it, by reaching out your hand, as one might say, you could lay it upon the very throne of God. Father, perfect my trust, Strengthen the might of my faith; Feel as I would when my feet Are slipping over the brink; JANUARY 20: MORNING. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you.Acts i., 8. Do you suppose a parent dislikes to see real vigor, and joy, and elasticity, and genius, and attainment, and capacity in his children? Is there any thing that makes a parent happier than to see, so long as it is good, the utmost growth and development in his children? If their powers are not perverted, the more they expand the more satisfaction does the parent derive from them. And does God, who is more than any earthly father, love dry and withered natures, or full and joyful ones, that are pouring out the freshness of their life? Be not a gloomy-eyed, twilight-faced, bat-like Christian, hovering between night and day. Be not a Christian parsimonious of joy, and full of tears and sadness. Do not attempt to be a Chris tian after the pattern of the ascetic. "The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy"— righteousness of rectitude and integrity, peace which God gives by the regulation of man's nature, and joy which is the reflection of heaven from the burnished experiences of an enlightened soul. JANUARY 20: EVENING. They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. I came, not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.-Luke v., 31, 32. God does not look down on the world, saying, "Men are all sinful; you are doing wrong; stop doing it, and I will look smilingly upon you." God so loved the world when it was ly ing in wickedness, before it had made any attainment in righteousness, that he gave his Son to die for it. While we were yet enemies to him, God poured out his all-inspiring love upon us, to draw us toward him. As the atmosphere of the globe, sunlit and sun-warmed, is full of influences that give life and health to the plant, so the atmosphere of the soul, permeated by the love of Christ Jesus, is full of influences that vivify and strengthen the higher faculties. That which Christ means by faith in him is that sense of his love, and patience, and goodness which enables a man, though he comes short of what he ought to be and ought to do, to go to the Savior and say, "I know that thou lovest me still." A feeling of certainty of his goodness toward you, no matter how poor you are—that is the faith that Christ wants. That faith which begins little by little to work by love-that is the faith that disenthralls, that is the faith that sanctifies and perfects. JANUARY 21: MORNING. I will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth, saving he that receiveth it.-Rev. ii., 17. In the Orient precious stones were frequently made into signet rings, and, as such, they carried authority, because they suggested the personal identity of the wearer. They were also presents given as tokens of ordinary regard by neighbor to neighbor, or friend to friend; or else they were bestowed as honors. Where a prince or a monarch desired to confer the highest testimony of his appreciation of one that had served him or the kingdom, he gave him a precious stone, with his name cut on it. But a more precious use of these stones was as love-tokens, and in this case they were cut with mystic symbols. As two lovers agree upon names the meaning of which is known only to themselves, or as they speak to each other in endearing terms which belong to them severally, not in baptism, not in common parlance, but by the agreement of the heart, so it was customary to cut in stones names or initials which no one could understand but the one who gave it and the one to whom it was given. Now these two uses of the precious stones are blended in the figure of the text. God says, "I am the eternal King, and I am the eternal Lover, and to him that is faithful to me, and that overcometh, I will give, as a token of my love and honoring, a white stone." What is meant by a white stone I do not know, but I prefer to think that it was an opal, the most human of all stones. The diamond is the more spiritual; there is less of color and more of suggestion in it; but the opal has in it more sympathy, more feeling, more wondrous beauty, more of those moods that belong to the human heart; and of all the stones that are worn to signify human affection, none is to be compared to the opal. And methinks, when God makes this promise of the white stone, it is as if he said, "I will cut your lovename in an opal, and as your King and Lover I will give it to you, and no man shall know the meaning of that name but you yourself." JANUARY 21: EVENING. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.-2 Cor. iv., 17. IF in Kansas the careful husbandman, whose starving cattle have but a faint chance of living the winter through, sees a wisp of straw, a handful of stalks, or a particle of hay being wasted, it sorely grieves him. He is so near to the edge of |