and that vanity; and more and more bringing the man away from the lower and animal realm, to a higher region, where he sees the lustre of those virtues which bring him into affinity, and which will finally bring him into contact, with God.

Aspire, find out the source of your Christ-life, and grow in grace. Knowledge comes from likeness. Put on Jesus Christ as a garment. Eat Him as bread; drink Him as wine, or the water of life. Be Christ; not in the sphere of the Infinite, but in the sphere of your own personality. Then, knowing Him, give forth the word of life and the light of life, that men, seeing you, may glorify your Father which is in heaven.

Every true man is like the true Christ that is in him. There is something of the earth with which he treads upon the ground and with which he deals with things as they are; there are also high celestial faculties that commune with God and with the invisible realm; and the perfect character is the one which combines them both.

There are many fine natures hidden under coarse forms. Powerful impressions are produced on many who cannot resolve them into ideas, and still less fash

ion them to words. Along the furrow, by the workbench, in the chamber, or in the kitchen, have been thousands silently plying the unknown with as solemn an earnestness as that of those who write books to prove how little man can know of the Unknowable.

When you cry out for God, he will cry out for you. There was never a heart homesick for heaven, that heaven was not homesick for it. Never did a soul long for God, that God did not long for that soul.

Have you ever been among the songsters on the edge of a forest in June, and heard the warblers singing, and the sparrows chirping, and the blue-birds' exquisite little lady-note? If, during a chorus of birds' voices, a hawk in the air, so high as not to throw a shadow on the ground, should but once scream, every little voice would be hushed. One note up there is enough to put to silence five hundred notes down here. So it is in the human soul. Men have all manner of ecstacies; but let there be one hawknote struck, and it will put all these ecstasies and joys to flight.

There are multitudes that are like my Wisteria -a plant of the loveliest habit, which you shall see in the

early spring abundantly, in the cities and in the country. When transplanted it is very apt to be obstinate and to refuse to grow. I planted it early, and I got a little dwarf, stumpy vine, tree-like, not two feet high. I waited one year, two years, three years, four years, until I got out of all patience with it, and I said to the gardener, "Take it up; throw it away". He took it up, but not to throw it away. He planted it in a more favorable corner, where something happened, I know not what, in the mystery of nature, and the very next year it broke its bonds and sent up its vine, and clasped and clambered and covered all the end of the house, and ran up on to the adjacent trees, and filled the whole air with its perfume and with the beauty of its blossom. Multitudes of men there are just like it, living so near the ground, and without any aspiration, that they never know what they are, in themselves, and to what their possibilities lead up—never.

Vanity makes us wish to be superior to others, moral aspiration to be superior to ourselves.

While the practical is an indispensable part of the mind, that life in the soul which never has an exponent of words or deeds, is the noblest. The heroism, the enthusiasms, the silent thought and holy aspirations, God regards as the best part of the soul.

True aspiration is not to wish to be different from what God has made us, but to be able to develop all that He has put into us.

As a lake, when all the streams have emptied their fulness into it, when first it sees the ray and feels the warmth of the sun, begins to rise toward it in mists and exhalations, so the heart filled with all that earth can supply, when first it lies consciously in the presence of God, aspires toward him, sets with all its tides in that direction.

What we call yearning is the heart of God drawing us heavenward.

Even the poor mute root in the cellar, that lies all winter long-the turnip, or the potato-dead, yet knows when April and May come, knows that there is a sun out-side, and begins to sprout, and finds its way, growing in the dark with long, long vines; and if there be a slit or a crack, it will work toward the light; and shall not I, that am no root nor vegetable, no matter through what winters, find my way toward the great Center of warmth and light? If there is summer in heaven I will find it. Though I be

plunged into the depths of hell, I long for such a God as is manifest by Jesus Christ; and I will find Him. I shall see Him for myself, and not another for me. I shall be like him yet, though it may be myriads of ages hence.

The whole man, in orderly succession, unfolds through successive stages. The kingdom of God is the highest stage. That is the blossom of all the rest. We are made perfect men in Christ Jesus. Before that time we are raw, unripe, undeveloped, undisclosed; we are plants that grow in a clime so far north that the summer is not warm enough nor long enough to show what they are in their higher development.

The growth of the Church is not by the numbers that are in it, but by the graces, the beauty of holiness, the variety and ripeness of Christian feeling character. These are signs of growth. Whatever tends to make men, looking upon you, revere you, esteem you, love you, whatever lifts their conception of your spiritual excellence, gives strength to the Church.

Many persons boil themselves down to a kind of molasses goodness. It is not such goodness as there is in the live peach, in the luscious apple, or in the