plied. "Yes, father, I can if you will stand by me and hold my hand." And he did.

When under the knife, clasp the hand of divine

love.

220

To go and lay life into the obedience of God as a diamond lays itself into the sunshine, that the mere surface brilliancy may deepen, and region behind region of splendor be revealed below that does not seem to come into our thought.PHILLIPS BROOKS.

Take your vase of venice glass out of the furnace and strew chaff over it in its transparent heat and recover that to its clearness and rubied glory when the north wind has blown upon it, but do not strew chaff over the child fresh from God's presence and expect to bring the heavenly colors back to Him, at least in this world.-RUSKIN.

When I talked with an ardent missionary and pointed out to him that his creed found no support in my experience, he replied, "It is not so in your experience, but is so in the other world." I answered, "Other world? There is no other world. God is one and omnipresent; here or nowhere is the whole fact."-EMERSON.

IX

LIFE'S ENVIRONMENT

THERE are two great laws which meet every human being upon the very threshold of life. The law of heredity and the law of environment. Both demand instant recognition, and each carries a look to startle, if not to frighten. Blood and circumstances are not ordinary words in our vocabulary. "Blood will tell," and, alas, it so often tells the saddest of stories. Condition and surrounding have such fashioning and almost fixing force that they complete the biography, and oftentimes write the last chapter of the tragic story.

The facts are so evident that there can be no dispute. The greatest peril is that men carry the truth to an extreme and write with it that false word-fate.

Open eyes are speedy discoverers in this field of observation. Even closed eyes learn the great lesson of life in the school of experience. Every

man is acted upon and affected by that which moves in the circle about him each day and each moment of his life. Information concerning the company a man keeps is always information concerning the man himself. An associate invariably stamps himself upon the life of his companion. Even a refined and cultivated nature is completely changed by this process. It has the power to debase the highest, and transform refinement, and culture into brutality and dissipation. A book, or a paper, or a picture is effectual in elevating or lowering the life into which it enters. No man ever walked through an art gallery without carrying the gallery away with him, and yet he was not a thief. No man listened to a symphony of Beethoven or a creation of Haydn without absorbing rythm, and harmony, and heaven's own music, but the trash of the common playhouse leaves its impress also. Light, sensational literature makes light and frothy character. Solid and thoughtful reading is the author of noble manhood and womanhood.

A man's mind in a book is like a sponge in the water. Who is not affected by the day itself? A cloudy, foggy world pushes its way into the soul. A day when the king is on his throne in the sky

colors of the wardrobe are changed. The romp of the children is no longer heard, and life is a blank without them. Oh! the pangs of pain at the thought of the little grave; the tops, and strings, and dolls stored away forever. No pain on earth like that pain; it cuts the deepest and last the longThere is no sound so sweet but the screw

est.

of the casket grates through it. Human pain, poignant and piercing, is destined in some form to reach all men. Hopes withered, cradles emptied, friendships fractured, resources vanished, health broken, ideals unrealized, ambitions shattered, all enter into the catalogue of the methods of pain; so hard, so stern, so relentless, so severe. Many members of the human family have not seen a well day throughout life. They have worn a path in the carpet from the couch and the chair to the medicine-closet. The most familiar words in their vocabulary are bottle, and draught, and spoon, and glass, and powder, and pill; backache, headache, sideache, heartache are the closest companions of most men and women. The hardest battle is against ill temper and irritability born of disease. The whole road seems to be filled with obstacles and the air charged with exhaustion. Digestion,