RUNNING BY THE SIGNALS

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TO railroad accidents are more lamentable or inexcusable than those arising from neglect of signals. For as our systems are organized today each trainman is supposed to know what each green light and each red light and every other warning device means, and upon his prompt and thorough obedience depend the lives and property of those who have entrusted themselves to the railway companies for safe transportation. And when a man, either through carelessness or wilfulness, disregards a signal he nullifies the proper working out of a carefully planned schedule and often brings terrible consequences upon himself, and others.

We are all quick to condemn the recreant engineer or switchman, but when it comes to the sphere of our own lives we daily run by the signals with hardly a thought of what we are doing. The course of life

resembles a railroad track. We start at a given point and are headed toward the terminus at the other end of the line, but

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as we rush along how numerous are the chances for derailment and disaster! Yet as we speed forward, there are placed along the track at certain intervals warning and admonishing signals. We are told when to slow up and when to quicken our pace and when to halt altogether. There is one class of signals for children and another for young men and young women and another for persons in middle life and still another for the aged, but no period of life is without its signals.

The warnings that relate to our physical well-being are many and constant. The baby toddles up to the stove, puts its fingers on the hot cover, and cries out with pain. And that experience serves as a signal to remind the child perhaps for all time that stoves with fires in them are always hot and are always to be let alone. Through the limbs and bodies of older people dart now and then significant pains or they find themselves sleepless at night or craving strong stimulants or are irritable and fretful. Signals they are which nature, overdriven. or neglected, hangs out to tell us that we are doing violence to our bodies, which are something more than so much muscle,

bone, and tissue. They are veritable temples of the Holy Spirit. The signals mean that it is time to slow up, to reconstruct our methods, to consider whether we are doing the fair thing by ourselves in point of diet, exercise, and rest.

As we mingle with our fellow men we get a variety of helpful signals that if heeded may lead us to a stricter watch upon habits and actions. An unexpectedly large bill comes in. Your feeling of irritation is perhaps the token that you are living beyond your means or are too socially ambitious. Somebody jokes you about your fondness for somebody else's wife. It's only a joke made in good temper, and yet it sets you thinking and you become more circumspect.

What signals does a man get from time to time touching the state and prospects of his soul? Some Sunday morning your little child comes to you and says, "Papa, why don't you ever go to church with us?" The blunt question rather startles you, and instead of answering her directly you repeat the question silently to yourself. Or maybe you are a churchgoer, but the sermons and the hallowed associations fail to touch and inspire you as they used to do. It is pos

sible that the minister is becoming dull, but it is more likely that your mind is so crusted over with schemes for getting rich that the arrow from the preacher's quiver cannot pierce to the spot where you really live. Nothing is more pathetic in human life than the increasing insensibility of many men absorbed in business and pleasure to the appeal of higher interests, their unsusceptibility to the higher forms of literature, music, and art, their indifference to Jesus Christ.

But in the gracious ordering of life there are signals all along the way. And they mean that One is trying to communicate with us who has more knowledge than we and who wants to help us avoid pitfalls and snares. He knows the track ahead of us as we cannot know it, and he would save us from plunging headlong to wreck and

ruin.

THE BURIED LIFE

But often in the world's most crowded streets,
But often in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life.

HUS Matthew Arnold depicts the

yearning which now and then comes to a man for an earlier mood, a former attitude, a lost experience vanished, but not forgotten for the moment out of reach, but not altogether irrecoverable.

What have you done with the best part of you, my friend? Perhaps you do not realize the fact, but you have practically dug a grave and deposited therein the thing that was finest and purest in you. Upon it, as the years have come and gone, you have spread layer after layer of interest in lesser matters, and now that former self is stifling for breath.

There was a time when the sweet and simple satisfaction of the home meant a good deal to you; when you would shorten your luncheon-hour in order that you might get home in season to toss the baby in your