AND this will we do, if God permit. HEB.

vi. 3.

THROUGH every hour of painful breath

Henceforth our souls must carve their price;
Life's hope is past, life's purpose stays.

Better than life, better than death

Is this the living sacrifice;

God keep us worthy all our days!

The Disciples.

BUT when a man has thus accepted the baptism by water, he is not yet safe. He is like one who has climbed a precipice and lies down to sleep by its brink. His life has been left clean by the ebbing tide of his temptation; but if he does not bar out the waters, back they will come upon him as surely as the flood-tides of the sea. A man cannot live safely in this negative purity. His safety lies in the supplanting of the old passions by new and better ones, by the discovery of new interests which leave no room for the old.

FRANCIS G. PEABODY.

FOR our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh out for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.- 2 COR. iv. 17.

COUNT each affliction, whether light or grave,
God's messenger sent down to thee. Do thou
With courtesy receive him; rise and bow,
And, ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave
Permission first his heavenly feet to lave;
Then lay before him all thou hast; allow
No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow
Or mar thy hospitality, no wave

Of mortal tumult to obliterate.

The soul's marmoreal calmness: grief should be Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate;

Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free; Strong to consume small troubles; to commend Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the

end.

AUBREY DE Vere.

NEVERTHELESS, seeing that as the Author of our salvation was Himself consecrated by affliction, so the way by which we are to follow Him is not set with rushes, but strewed with thorns, be it never so hard to learn, we must learn to suffer with patience even that which seemed impossible to be suffered.

RICHARD HOOKER.

BUT let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation.

v. 8.

EVERY day is a fresh beginning,

Every morn is the world made new.
You who are weary of sorrow and sinning,
Here is a beautiful hope for you, -
A hope for me and a hope for you.

Yesterday now is a part of forever,

- I THESS.

Bound up in a sheaf, which God holds tight,

With glad days, and sad days, and bad days, which never Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight, Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.

Every day is a fresh beginning;

Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,

And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,
Take heart with the day, and begin again.

THERE is no day born but comes like a stroke of music into the world and sings itself all the way through.

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty. — JAMES ii. 12.

DUTY.

LIGHT of dim mornings; shield from heat and cold;
Balm for all ailments; substitute for praise;
Comrade of those who plod in lonely ways
(Ways that grow lonelier as the years wax old);
Tonic for fears; check to the over-bold;

Nurse, whose calm hand its strong restriction lays;
Kind but resistless on our wayward days;
Mart, where high wisdom at vast price is sold;
Gardener, whose touch bids the rose petals fall,
The thorns endure; surgeon, who human hearts
Searches with probes, though the death touch be given ;
Spell that knits friends, but yearning lovers parts;
Tyrant relentless o'er our blisses all;·
Oh, can it be thine other name is Heaven?

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

BEGIN with small things, Madam. You cannot enter the presence of another human being without finding there more to do than you or I, or any soul, will ever learn to do perfectly before he die. Let us be content to do little, if God sets us at little tasks.

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

I WILL lead them in paths that they have not known. — ISA. xlii. 16.

LORD, I had chosen another lot,
But then I had not chosen well;
Thy choice and only thine was good:
No different lot, search heaven or hell,
Had blessed me, fully understood;
None other which Thou orderest not.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.

IN old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no whitewinged angels now; but yet men are led away from threatening destruction, a hand is put in theirs which leads them forth gently toward a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward.

GEORGE ELIOT.