will be, “Perfection in details." He who could not attend to little things would soon find he had no great ones to look after. And shall we limit the Holy One of Israel? Yea, dishonour Him by supposing Him to have called into existence a world, with the details of which He is over-mastered?

A third form of the difficulty may be thus stated :-"It is not that we suppose the Divine Being unable to look after minute affairs, but they seem too trivial to be worthy the attention of the Infinite One." Trivial! Who can tell what is trivial, and what is not? No great event ever happened without millions of contributory circumstances, each. one of which was minute in itself. There is a worm at the root of a gourd. Well, that's nothing.

Ay, but it helps to educate a man. Paul has a thorn in the flesh; 'tis of no moment. I Contrariwise, that very thorn helps to comfort thousands in all after time. And who does not know that incidents, which at the time of their occurrence are thought nothing of, are often, very often, the turning-points of life. "But," says a fourth, "it is not in the case of others that my difficulty arises, it is in my own case I find it so hard to believe that MY concerns are thus graciously disposed." That is where the difficulty presses with most of us. Yet this is the very state of mind which is rebuked in Isaiah xl. 27, 28. As if the Prophet had said-Wait till God is weary! then and not till then will you have a reason for your fears.

And are not all these doubts rebuked by the experience of life? How often do we feel ashamed of our doubt as we look back through the vista of past years. Events unnoticed at the time have shaped our entire after-life. Trials that we thought have crushed us have trained. What seemed once isolated and unmeaning has proved to be a link in the chain of sequences, by which we are where we are and what we are to-day. The small and the great, the dark and the bright, have all placed their part in our life's story. The lot was cast into the cup; but the whole disposal thereof has been of the Lord.

Let us then give God the honour He claims, as the Absolute Disposer. In the faith of this doctrine let "the grace of God" fill our hearts. Specially if, as we begin a New Year, life is opening up afresh to us, and new responsibilities impend. Shall we take upon us the burden of to-morrow, or of next month, or of this year? Let us not thus wrong God. Our lot is cast into the lap, and we know But God does, for He has the disposal of

not how it will turn up.

it, and He will never suffer one of His children to be the sport of any wind, to be ever out of a Father's care, or away from the guardianship of His watchful eye.

Then let us commit our way unto God. Let our prayer be"Lord, dispose of my lot for me." Let husbands and wives, parents and children, blend their supplications together at this New Year, content to ask only that all may have grace to be and to go, to do and to hear, whatever and whenever God pleases, following the pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, which will be with us all our journey through.

This is the sum of the Christian life: to do the work of the day in the day, leaning on God for the strength to do it, and leaving all the rest in His gracious hands. This is to go on day by day, till the last day of life comes; and, if we know it to be the last, we may then spend it just like all the rest, and wait till we, who have been faithful in the least, shall serve Him also in much.

IF

BY MARY SHERWOOD.

CHAPTER I.

ever there was a man who deserved to be called one of "God Almighty's gentlemen," that man is Old Anthony Humberstone. Anthony has no patent of nobility except nature's own, and as for arms, I never heard of his having any except the two rheumatic old limbs which give him so much trouble sometimes in their joints when the wind is east, or the weather damp and cold. He is not rich, and it is not likely that he ever will be, seeing that he is now, and has been for the last ten years and more, one of the seven bedesmen or pensioners, belonging to what is known in the little town of King's Norton as Dame Mortimer's Charity. And he is no "scholar" either; for save the big, well-thumbed, leather-backed Bible which he knows by heart almost, from beginning to end, he hardly ever has a book in his hand.

And yet I say again, Old Anthony Humberstone is one of the most thorough gentlemen I know. He has that gentle mind which, in high and low, rich and poor alike, is sure to express itself in gentle

manners; that genuine courtesy of heart which makes it impossible for him to say, or do, or even to feel an uncourteous thing; that God-given instinct for all that is "pure, lovely, and of good report," which causes his outward life to be seemingly, what his inward life is in reality, as simple and chivalrous as that of any knight of the olden time.

It is as good as a sermon any day, better than many that I have heard, to look at Anthony's face; the kindly, calm, old face, on which peace and love are written as plainly as if God's own finger had traced them there. As indeed it has; for Anthony's face is one of those 66 living epistles, known and read of all men," which are just like a message from the Lord Himself, telling us what a Christian is, and bidding us walk so as we have them for examples. Some people have an idea that religion is a dull and gloomy thing; that it shuts them out of a great many pleasures, and shuts them up to a great many disagreeable duties. They think that it is all very well for sick folk, or for those who are in trouble, or who are about to die; but they have a notion that somehow it is not at all a pleasant thing to go through life with. But one look at Old Anthony's face would quite dispel such an idea. They would see written on it as plainly as if the words were illuminated in letters of living light, the text " Godliness with contentment is great gain."

Indeed I have seen it written there myself, and have felt as if Old Anthony, though he little knew that he was doing so, was preaching me the best sermon I had ever heard on those beautiful words.

For there are many kinds of sermons besides those which are preached from pulpits, and many ways of preaching them besides that of giving out a text and saying something about it; and as I have said, it is as good as a sermon to look at Old Anthony's face, for it is so shone through at all times by the light from within, that it seems as if there was always some text or other illuminated upon it, on which the old bedesman was unconsciously discoursing. But if Anthony's face speaks for its master, and seems to say by its gentle lines and kindly looks what a God of love he serves, his tongue is not silent either; and just as you cannot look at the old man's face without feeling somehow the better for it, neither can you be for five minutes in his company without hearing from his lips some of those words of wisdom which are indeed but the utterance, in human speech, of that spirit of truth and love which has long had its abode in Old Anthony's heart,

It is not always easy in these days to tell whether it is really the spirit of truth and uprightness that is speaking to us through the voice of some of those who occupy the pulpits of our land. Too often, it is to be feared, the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, and those who hear it and answer to its summons find that it is not heavenwards at all that it is calling then, but manwards rather, with cunningly devised fables that lead astray the unthinking soul. But there is nothing to mislead in the sermons that Old Anthony's face preaches, or in the words of wisdom that fall from his lips. There is a very sure and simple test, which, if applied to them, would show where Anthony's wisdom comes from. It is just this, which the Apostle James has given us, and by which we may all of us try ourselves as well as others :

"The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy."

Now there is not a single word of all this which would not apply to Old Anthony so exactly that you might almost think his portrait had been painted in it; and therefore, when I listen to the words of kindly wisdom which fall from the lips of the good old man, I feel sure that I may trust every one of them, just as much, ay! even more, than if I were listening to some great pulpit orator, whose fame for eloquence and originality gathers crowds around him to hear what new thing he has to say to them.

There is not much originality in anything that I have ever heard Old Anthony say. I mean by that there is not much which he has not found for himself in that thumbed, leather-backed Bible which he knows so well, and which is such a constant companion of his— nothing which any of us, if we studied it as diligently, might not find out also for ourselves. But then it is the way he sets one thing over against another, taking the text sometimes out of one book in the Bible, and another out of that, and striking the two together, and so fetching a light from both which could not have been seen in either separately. I have often known him do that, and indeed it is wonderful how without any help of either human teaching or man's commentaries, but only with the leather-backed Bible itself, he has made Scripture its own interpreter, until from words which were so familiar to the ear that it seemed as if all the meaning they held must be familiar too, he would bring out such treasures of wisdom that one wondered both how he found them there, and how it was

that we had never found for ourselves before what was so plainly to be seen when once the eye of the heart was directed to it.

I wish I could take my reader with me this afternoon; for I am going now, as I often do, to have a chat with the old bedesman, and to carry him a little packet of prime "birdseye." Anthony is very fond of his pipe, though he never takes it oftener than once a day, after dinner; or when his rheumatism is very bad, perhaps before supper too. It is the one luxury of life with him, and as I have heard him say, "It is one of the Lord's ways of being good to him. For now that the time of day has come to him, as it does to other old men who are far on their way to fourscore years, when the strong men bow themselves, and the keepers of the house tremble, and the grinders cease because they are few, and even the grasshopper is a burden, yet the Lord lets his pipe be a comfort to him, so that the aches in his old bones are a bit easier to bear."

I wish everybody took their pleasures and their comforts straight from the Lord's hands as gratefully as Anthony takes his; so that when the poor worn-out body is little more than a bundle of aching nerves, they can find something to enjoy and be thankful for, if it be only a pipe. But as I was saying at the beginning of this chapter, Anthony's face seems always to have some text or other illuminated upon it, and those words of his about his pipe, when I heard them, seemed to me just like a homely, practical sermon, full of wisdom and true devoutness, upon the text which I have so often seen there:-"Godliness with contentment is great gain."

But I have not time now to stay any longer chatting about 'my old friend. In another chapter, if you care to make further acquaintance with him, I may tell you more about his words and ways, and something too of the history of his life as I have heard it from himself.

(To be continued in our next.)

H

JOHN KNOX.

CAST thou hope?" the bystanders asked of John Knox when he lay dying. He was unable to reply, but raised his finger, and pointed upwards, and so he died.—Carlyle.