cheer, of love and comfort that comes from Thee, O Thou Prince and Saviour.

It is a good thing to make it sure that we shall live hereafter; but it is also a good thing to know how to live here and now. This is simply a practice ground,

and we are to live hereafter, and know that we are, by practicing those virtues which will make it possible for us to understand anything in heaven-its company, its joys, its associations.

This life is a forming, not an enjoying one. Happiness is not the end to be attained here, but manliness.

All the arrangements of our lives are parts of God's system of instruction, and they form an organic whole, of which every part is necessary to the perfectness of the whole.

The way to live is not to think about living, to do without speculating about doing.

Once, when a boy, I stood on Mount Pleasant, at Amherst, and saw a summer thunder-storm enter the valley of the Connecticut from the north. Before it

all was bright; centerwise it was black as midnight, and I could see the fiery streaks of lightning striking down through it; but behind the cloud-for I could see the rear it was bright again. In front of me was that mighty storm hurtling through the sky; and before it I saw the sunlight, and behind it I saw the sunlight; but to those that were under the center of it there was no brightness before or behind it. They saw the thunder-gust, and felt the pelting rain, and were enveloped in darkness, and heard the rush of mighty winds; but I, that stood afar off, could see that God was watering the earth, and washing the leaves, and preparing the birds for a new outcome of jubilee, and giving to men refreshment and health. So I conceive that our human life here, with its sorrows and tears, as compared with the eternity that we are going into, is no more than the breath of a summer thunder-storm; and if God sees that our experience in this world is to work out an exceeding great reward in the world to come, there is no mystery in it -to Him.

O, if one's life might be like the life of a skiff or yacht, or any craft or single sail in the sequestered lake, which rude winds never disturb, living would be easy; that is, it would be easy to live, if there were not so many men around; but to carry our slender bark amid currents and violent winds and constant whirls, amid rocks and bars, and amid fleets sailing in every direction—that is not easy.

You are worse than you think you are; you are bet

ter than you think you are.

You are not doing half doing; you are doing a

so much as you ought to be thousand times more than you dream of. You are working for this life too exclusively, but your work strikes through into the future life, and there is another significance given to it on the other side.

Life is not a grand concert which we enter to hear magnificent playing upon sweet instruments. It is more like a piano manufactory, where one hears, not music, but a confusion of noises, sawing, rattling, thumping, grating — all inharmonious sounds.

Men have reasoned on the supposition that this world is a place where we are put to be played upon. It is rather the place where those chords are made and tuned which God's own hand shall play upon, hereafter.

At midnight, undertake to examine a landscape with a candle, carrying it round to each particular thing, and try thus to get an idea of the whole scene. That is the way we are exploring in this life. But let a thunder-storm come up, and a flash of lightning opens the whole country-hill, valley, cliff, every part-to

instantaneous view; and we see it instantly. That is the way we will think in the other life.

Live in the future when the present is intolerable. The future is that which lies along the path-walk of Christ, where the promises are.

Life is one grand insufficiency. Human life is like a half-finished portrait; the features marked out and hinted at, some one part, perhaps, carried further than another; but no man can determine what it is or how it shall look when it is perfected. In this life we are grinding pigments, we are collecting materials; we but dimly see, and that imperfectly. But there will come a day when I shall know even as I am known; and as God, the All-knowing, looks through and through me, and knows me altogether, I shall behold Him as He is, and all shadows and partialities will have passed away forever.

Life may not be worth living here, but may be transcendently worth living on account of the hereafter; for man is a biennial, and it takes two lives to tell him what he is. The hollyhock cannot bloom till the second season. All the first season it has no comeliness; it is coarse in leaf, undeveloped in stem, and shows no color; and the winter hushes it to rest; but the next

summer brings it out, and it lifts itself up in unimagined beauty as compared with what it was in its first summer. So men are born here for a start; and they are to come to themselves only after death, and when the second summer shall find them, then they will be lifted up in unimagined glory and beauty, unless winter kills them.

This world's march is not a dumb, dull march to execution. It is not a march to a sort of clouded victory. It is a march to ethereal light by and by.

The fruitions of this world are nothing to the harvests of single kernels which will wave a hundred-fold in the other life.

Grant, we pray Thee, that we may be so intoned by the hope of the heavenly life, that we may live so near to the encouragements of it, that we shall be able to take enough out of it to uphold us in the present stress of life; that we may not only walk as seeing Him Who is invisible, but walk the realm invisible where He dwells.

A man who does not know how to live here probably will not know how to live hereafter, until after a