MARCH 12. These things I have spoken unto you, that in Me ye might have peace.-JOHN xvi. 33. Christ came not to revolutionize, but to ennoble, and to sanctify. He came to reveal that the eternal was not the Future, but only the unseen; that eternity was no ocean whither men were being swept by the river of time, but was around them now; and their lives were only real in so far as they felt its reality and its presence. He came to teach that God was no dim abstraction, infinitely separated from them in the far-off blue, but that He was the Father in which they lived and moved and had their being; and that the service which He loved was not ritual and sacrifice, not pompous scrupulosity and censorious orthodoxy, but mercy and justice, humility and love. He came not to hush the natural music of men's lives, nor to fill it with storm and agitation, but to retune every silver chord "in that harp of a thousand strings," and to make it echo with the harmonies of heaven.-FARRAR. MARCH 13. But made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant.-PHILIPPIANS ii. 7. In all ages there has been an exaggerated desire for wealth; an exaggerated admiration for those who possess it; an exaggerated belief in its influence in producing or increasing the happiness of life; and from these errors a flood of cares and jealousies and meannesses have desolated the life of man, And therefore Jesus chose voluntarily "the low estate of the poor,"-not, indeed, an absorbing, degrading, grinding poverty, which is always rare, and almost always remediable, but that commonest lot of honest poverty which, though it necessitates self-denial, can provide with ease for all the necessaries of a simple life. "Is not this the carpenter," occurs in Mark vi. 3. We may, indeed, be thankful that this word remains, for it is full of meaning, and has exercised a very noble and blessed influence over the fortunes of mankind, and has tended to console and sanctify the estate of poverty, to ennoble the duty of labour. Our Lord wished to show that labour is a pure and a noble thing; it is the salt of life; it is the girdle of manliness; it saves the body from effeminate languor, and the soul from polluting thoughts. Christ laboured, working with His own hands.-FARRAR. MARCH 14. And the Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar, an How grand a display is there, in the life of Joseph, of the power of a living inward sense of God's perpetual presence in ennobling the soul of man! For what condition could be more open to temptation than that of this Hebrew lad, in the absolute loneliness of his first Egyptian life? Home F associations, the voice of love, the watching eye of tender care, the acting up to an already established character-what helps are these! And these seemed to be gone from him altogether. How noble to be the same without them; to have no lowering of the standard from the loss of all outward safeguards, no sapping of the foundations of moral responsibility from his loss, as a stranger, a foreigner, and a slave, of the elevating sense of personality, and the preserving love of character! How grand still to have, like some lustrous diamond gleaming inwardly on his lonely spirit, the talisman of the one thought," How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?" This thought was strong enough so to quicken his conscience, that it still connected indissolubly this broken, disconnected present with that old past of his younger life; and whilst he moved amidst the new temptations of the house of the Egyptian, he still lived, in thought and love and faith, in the old tent at Hebron, and saw the fond face of his aged father, and bowed with him anew before the God of Israel.-BISHOP WILBERFORCE. MARCH 15. Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? ISAIAH lv. 2. False glozing pleasures, casks of happinesse, Chases in Arras, gilded emptinesse, Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career, Embroider'd lyes, nothing between two dishes; These are the pleasures here. True earnest sorrows, rooted miseries, Plain demonstrations, evident and clear, But oh the folly of distracted men Who griefs in earnest, joys in jest persue, HERBERT. MARCH 16. Wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness. Memory is the treasure of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved. Brute creatures equal, if not exceed, men in a rare retentive memory. Through how many labyrinths of woods, without other clue or threads than natural instinct doth the hunted hare return to her muse! How doth the little bee, flying into several meadows and gardens, sipping off many cups, yet never intoxicated, through an ocean of air steadily steer herself home without help, or card, or compass. But these cannot play an after game, and recover what they have forgotten, which is done by the mediation of discourse. First soundly infix in thy mind what thou desirest to remember. What wonder is it if agitation of business jog that out of thy head which was there rather tacked than fastened? Over-burthen not thy memory to make so faithful a servant a slave. Memory, like a purse, if it be over-full that it cannot shut, all will drop out of it. Marshal thy notions into a handsome method. One will carry twice more weight trussed and packed up in bundles than when it lies untowardly flapping and hanging about his shoulders. Things orderly parcelled up under heads are most portable.-FULLER. MARCH 17. And He went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them.-LUKE ii. 51. Almost in the centre of the chain of hills which form the northern limit of the plain of Jezreel, there is a singular cleft in the limestone, forming the entrance to a little valley. The basin of the valley is divided by hedges of cactus into little fields and gardens, which, about the fall of the spring rains, wear an aspect of indescribable calm, and glow with a tint of the richest green. Gradually the valley opens into a little natural amphitheatre of hills; and there, clinging to the hollow of the hills, lie the flat roofs and narrow streets of a little Eastern town; and that little town is Nazareth, where the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind, spent nearly thirty years of His mortal life. It was, in fact, His home, His native village for all but three or four years of His life on earth, the village which lent its then ignominious name to the |