PROCRASTINATION. Persons gifted with genius or fine talent often throw life away by a habit of putting off till to-morrow what ought to be done to-day. The following paragraph is pithy: 66 Going to do it" never made a fortune, built a house, or won a name. "Going to do it" has been the bane of more people than would fill the census of a dozen New Yorks. The man who is always "going to do it," rarely, if ever, does it. The only thing he does do, is to go out of the world without doing it. If he has a task which must be done, he at once announces, with a deal of boasting and a great waste of words, time, and breath, that he is "going to do it." And while he is thus "1 going to do it," somebody else, who is not suspected of "going to do it," does it, and reaps the reward. a the tract, and I thanked the little boy, and I said I'd read it; and I did read it, and the reading of it saved my soul. I saw I was sinner, and I saw that Jesus Christ could save me from iny sins. That 'Please, Sir,' was the entering wedge to my old hard heart." CHILDHOOD AND AGE. Childhood often holds a truth, with its feeble fingers, which the grasp of manhood cannot retain, which it is the pride of utmost age to recover.-Ruskin. WAITING. I have gained the victory, and Christ is holding out both hands to embrace me.-. -Rutherford. THE HOLY CITY. If we saw our Father's house, and that great and fair city, the New Jerusalem, which is up above sun and moon, we would cry to be over the water, and to be carried in Christ's arms out of this borrowed prison.Rutherford. THE THRONE OF GRACE. If you want your spiritual life to be more healthy and vigorous, you must just come more boldly to the throne of grace. The secret of your weakness is your little faith and little prayer. The fountain is unsealed, but you only sip a few drops. The bread of life is before you, yet you only eat a few crumbs. The treasury of heaven is open, but you only take a few pence. O! man of little faith, wherefore do you doubt? Awake to know your privileges; awake and sleep no longer. Tell me not of spiritual hunger and thirst, and poverty, so long as the throne of grace is before you. Say rather you are proud, and will not come to it as a poor sinner; say rather you are slothful, and will not take pains to get more. Cast aside the grave-clothes of pride that still hang around you. Throw off that Egyptian garment of indolence which ought not to have been brought through the Red Sea. Away with that unbelief which ties and paralyses your tongue. You are not straitened in God but in yourself. Come boldly to the throne of grace, where the Father is ever waiting to give, and Jesus stands by Him to intercede. Come boldly, for you may, all sinful as you are, if you come in the name of the great High Priest. Come boldly and ask largely, and you shall have abundant answers; mercy like a river, and grace and strength like a mighty stream. Come boldly and you shall have supplies exceeding all you can ask MY WIFE. WRITTEN BY AN INVALIDA I HEARD her, oh, how cautiously, Open my bed-room door; I heard her step as noiselessly To my couch across the floor; "Twere sinful to repine. Poetry. Her face was hovering over mine, Rose fervently but meek. I knew the cause of its alarm, I thought I loved her years ago- Thus watched that tried and patient or think. Hitherto you have asked nothing; ask and receive, that your joy may be full.-J. C. Rule. one, By night as well as day, In sadness and almost alone, I thought I loved her years ago→→ CONTRAST IN DEATH. "I am taking a fearful leap in the dark," said the dying infidel Hobbes. "This is heaven begun. I have done with darkness for ever. Nothing remains but light and joy for ever,' said the dying believer, Thomas Scott. "Oh, for a moment's peace!" cried a dying infidel. "Peace! blessed peace! Come, Lord Jesus!" whispered a dying Christian. Of joys that come no more; Of flowers whose bloom is fled; Of farewells wept upon the shore;' Of friends estranged or dead; Of all that now may seem, To memory's tearful eye, The vanished beauty of a dream, O'er which we gaze and sigh. HUMILITY. THE bird that sings on highest wing Builds on the ground her lowly nest, And she that doth most sweetly sing, Sings in the shade when all things rest; In lark and nightingale we see What honour hath humility. Personal Religion. SPECIAL VIEWS OF PRAYER. We lose many prayers for the want of two things which support each other,―specificness of object and intensity of desire. One's interest in such an exercise as this, is necessarily dependent on the co-existence of these qualities. In the diary of Dr. Chalmers we find recorded this petition: "Make me sensible of real answers to actual requests, as evidences of an interchange between myself on earth and my Saviour in heaven." Under the sway of intense desires, our minds naturally long to individualise thus the parties, the petitions, the objects, and the results of prayer. Sir Fowell Buxton writes as follows:-"When I am out of heart, I follow David's example, and fly for refuge to prayer, and he furnishes me with a store of prayer. I am bound to acknowledge that I have always found that my prayers have been heard and answered; in almost every instance I have received what I asked for. Hence, I feel permitted to offer up my prayers for everything that concerns me. I am inclined to imagine that there are no little things with God. His hand is as manifest in the feathers of a butterfly's wing, in the eye of an insect, in the folding and packing of a blossom, in the curious aqueducts by which a leaf is nourished, as in the creation of a world, and in the laws by which planets move. I understand literally the injunction: 'In everything make your requests known unto God; and I cannot but notice how amply these prayers have been met." 66 Again, writing to his daughter on the subject of a division" in the House of Commons, in the conflict for West Indian Emancipation, he says: "What led to that division? If ever there was a subject which occupied our prayers, it was this. Do you remember how we desired that God would give me His Spirit in that emergency; how we quoted the promise, 'He that lacketh wisdom, let him ask it of the Lord, and it shall be given him ;' and how I kept open that passage in the Old Testament, in which it is said, 'We have no might against this great company that cometh against us, neither know we what to do, but our eyes are upon VOL. XV. N Thee—the Spirit of the Lord replying, ‘Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours, but God's?' If you want to see the passage, open my Bible, it will turn of itself to the place. I sincerely believe that prayer was the cause of that division; and I am confirmed in this by knowing that we by no means calculated on the effect. The course we took appeared to be right, and we followed it blindly." In these examples is illustrated, in real life, the working of these two forces in a spirit of prayer, which must naturally exist or die together-intensity of desire and specificness of object. Let a man define to his own mind an object of prayer, and then let him be moved by desires for that object which impel him to pray, because he cannot otherwise satisfy the irrepressible longings of his soul; let him have such desires as shall lead him to search out, and dwell upon, and treasure in his heart, and return to again, and appropriate to himself anew, the encouragements to prayer, till his Bible opens of itself at the right places—and think you that such a man will have occasion to go to his closet, or come from it with the sickly cry, “Why, oh, why is my intercourse with God so irksome to me?" Such a man must experience, at least, the joy of uttering hopefully emotions which become painful by repression. On the contrary, let a man's object of thought at the throne of grace be vague, and let his desires be languid, and from the nature of the case his prayers must be both languid and vague. Says Jeremy Taylor:-" Easiness of desire is a great enemy to the success of a good man's prayer. It must be an intent, zealous, busy, operative prayer. For, consider what a huge indecency it is that a man should speak to God for a thing that he values not. Our prayers upbraid our spirits, when we beg tamely for those things for which we ought to die; which are more precious than imperial sceptres, richer than the spoils of the sea, or the treasures of Indian hills." The scriptural examples of prayer have, most of them, an unutterable intensity. They are pictures of struggles, in which more of suppressed desire is hinted than that which is expressed. Recall the wrestling of Jacob,-" I will not let thee go till thou hast blest me;" and the “panting" and "pouring out of soul" of David, "I cried day and night; my throat is dry with calling upon my God;" and the importunity of the Syro-Phenician woman, with her " 66 The scriptural examples of prayer, also, are clear as light in their objects of thought. Even those which are calm and sweet, like the Lord's Prayer, have few and sharply-defined subjects of devotion. They are not discursive and voluminous, like many uninspired forms of supplication. They do not range over everything at once. They have no vague expressions; they are crystalline; a child need not read them a second time to understand them. As uttered by their authors, they were in no antiquated phraseology; they were in the fresh forms of a living speech. They were, and were meant to be, the channels of living thoughts and living hearts. Let a man, then, be negligent of both scriptural example and the nature of his own mind; let him approach God with both vagueness of thought and languor of emotion; and what else can his prayer be but a weariness to himself and an abomination to God? It would be a miracle if such a suppliant should enjoy success in prayer. He cannot succeed, he cannot have joy, because he has no object that elicits intense desire, and no desire that sharpens his object. He has no great, holy, penetrative thought in him, which stirs up his sensibilities; and no deep, swelling sensibility, therefore, to relieve by prayer. His soul is not reached by anything he is thinking about, and, therefore, he has no soul to pour out before God. Such a man prays because he thinks he must pray; not because he is grateful to God that he may pray. There is an unspeakable difference between "must" and may." It is his conscience that prays; it is not his heart. His language is the language of his conscience. He prays in words which ought to express his heart, not in those which do express it. Hence arises that experience, so distressful to an ingenuous mind, in which devotion is prompted by no vividness of conception, rolling up a force of sensibility to the level of the lips, so that it can flow forth in childlike, honest speech. 66 Such an experience, so far from rendering prayer a joy either sweet and placid, or ecstatic, can only cause the time spent in the closet to be the season of periodical torture to a sensitive conscience, like that of a victim daily stretched on a rack. For it is |
