For Thine is ... the glory. — MATT. vi. 13. GOD OD is so infinite that nothing which we call human glory can furnish us with any analogy to His. We must go back again to the primary idea of the word glory, which is light and splendor. And not only does God "cover Himself with light as with a garment," but "God is light." When we say "Thine is the glory" we mean that without God the physical world would sink into a chaos of darkness, the moral world into an abyss of crime. In a starless night all is black; but from the moment that the dawn has kindled its first beacon-light of vivid crimson on the ice-clad mountain-peak, it fires-summit after summit -the splendor of the hills, and flows down their sides in rivers of molten gold. The streams flash into silver; the sea burns beneath the flood of radiance; the fields burst into color; the forest leaves and dewy flowers gleam with millions of diamonds; the whole world thrills and burns with lustre and with life. Like that is the glory of God. God is Light; He is that light, bodiless and impalpable, from whose unemptiable fountain our earthly light is but a faint spark, or a dim shadow. Around Thee all is light, IV. 234. F. R. HAVERGAL. THE For ever and ever. - MATT. vi. 13. HE imagination which can enter into the meaning of those words reels before them. There is something awfully pathetic and mysterious in the interminable procession of mankind over our earth. There are at this moment some fifteen hundred millions of human beings passing for their brief span across its surface. A few years past and they were not; a few years hence and their place will know them no more. The commonest things we use outlast us. full of death. Nature is The leaf falls, the tree dies, the gray earth is wrinkled with the graves of her children. The air is tremulous with knells; there are vacant places in our homes; the dust is strewn over the faces that we loved. What is man, whose breath is in his nostrils? Behold, we die, we perish, we all perish! Why, then, do we forsake the living fountains for our broken cisterns? He who eateth of this bread shall hunger, he who drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but he who eateth the bread of life, and drinketh of the water which Christ shall give him, shall hunger and thirst no more. Lofd, give us that water! Lord, evermore give us that bread from heaven, which is Thyself! Give it to us now and for ever. IV. 242, 245, 253. Then what this earth to thee, my heart? In all its fleetingness. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness.· REV. iii. 14. He who blesseth himself in the earth shall bless himself in the God of Amen, and he who sweareth in the earth shall swear by the God of Amen. Is. lxv. 16. All the promises of God in Him are yea, and in Him Amen. - I. COR. 20. IN N the Gospel of St. John alone, no less than twenty-five times our Lord Jesus Christ introduces his deepest asseverations with "Amen, Amen"-translated in our version, "Verily, verily I say unto you.' What, then, is the meaning of this solemn and sacred word? It means Truth; it means Reality. Every time we use it we should be reminded that God is not the God of fantasies and shams, but that He is the God of reality and of truth. Earnestly, then, I would invite you to base yourselves on the Amen, on the solid and ultimate reality of life, by denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, and living soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world; and to base your lives on the Amen of true religion; on those things which cannot be shaken, but remain. In these days, as in all days, a great deal is mixed up with religion which is not religion, and has nothing whatever to do with the God of Amen, with the Christ who is the Amen, the faithful and true witness. Seek truth, and you will find it, because God is the God of truth. IV. 259, 264. "We pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render LET the Lord's Prayer teach us that by Christ's own lesson, the condition of all prayer is action. Prayer, which we deem so easy, which we perform so perfunctorily, is, when it is real prayer, the passion of an effort, the wrestling of a life. Prayers which are not uttered from the heart are but forms and functions and idle breaths of articulated air. A Christian who does not pray is a dead Christian. He is not he cannot be a true Christian at all. For he violates the most im perious instinct, and flings away the chiefest blessing of the Christian life. To pray, to do IV. 125, 14. To pray, to do according to the prayer, TENNYSON. ST T. Luke's Gospel is dominated throughout by a spirit large and sweet and wise. It is full of tears and songs and laughter; it is the hymn of the new people, the hosanna of the little ones and of the humble introduced into the kingdom. . . It is preeminently the Gospel of the poor.. . He felt it to be his duty to warn all who were tempted as the rich in all ages are tempted—to trust in uncertain riches, instead of being rich towards God. It is not that he holds poverty in itself to be a beatitude, but only that kind of poverty which is "not voluntary nor proud, but only accepted and submissive; too laborious to be thoughtful, too innocent to be conscious, too long-experienced in sorrow to be hopeful; waiting in its peaceful darkness for the unconceived dawn, yet not without its sweet, complete, untainted happiness, like intermittent notes of birds before the daybreak, or the first gleams of heaven's amber in the eastern gray." Which is there of us all who does not need this lesson ? I. 76, 83. Honest love, honest sorrow, Honest work for the day, honest hope for the mor row, Are these worth nothing more than the hand they make weary, The heart they have saddened, the life they leave dreary? Hush! the sevenfold heavens to the voice of the Spirit Echo: He that o'ercometh shall all things inherit. OWEN MEREDITH. |