ALL the voices of our Divine manual, in their addresses to mcn, unite to press upon them the doing of some work within the brief span of mortal life that shall make that life fruitful, fragrant, and memorable. And as though anticipating the sluggish indolence of the nature they seek to arouse, or rather measuring the force of the current of its perverse and selfish activities, they lay the utmost urgency they can employ upon these stirring calls. "Son," saith the vineyard master, "go work to-day in my vineyard!"

The language of the Preacher is, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.' "Why stand ye here all the day idle?" asked the householder of them that stood for hire in the marketplace. And even our Divine Lord and Exemplar declared of himself, "I must work the works of Him that sent me while it is day; the night cometh when no man can work." And these are but a part of those heaven-tempered goads with which the Scripture seeks to prick us out of our apathy, and urge us to duty.

"To be, to do, and to suffer " is the only complete formula of a truly effective human life. Simply to be, just to crawl out of the dust like a lizard, to bask in the sun through our short day, then slink back to our earthy bed again, is as wicked as it is ignoble and unproductive. To be and to suffer, to sit down in the ashes, like Job with

VOL. XII.

his boils, and utter groans, and curse our day, and make ourselves and all about us miserable with our pains and our spleen, is not only to be content with a very poor-spirited sort of manhood, but to be disobedient to the henvenly call. But to be, to take life from God's hand, his inestimable gift, a life strung in every part, body and soul, with flexile sinews and elastic forces; to suffer, as that wise and wholesome discipline under which strong spirits grow stronger, and the weakest, by God's grace, are made mighty and enduring ; and to do, to act, to bend our loins to burdens, to put our shoulder to the wheels of humble and good endeavours, to toil for God's glory and man's advantage: these make up, not merely the ideal of an heroic and manly living, but obedience to the will of God.

See how we are equipped for work. Every power, corporeal, mental, and spiritual, has its appointed and appropriate function, failing which, we degrade it to the condition of a useless and idle appendage. The feet were made to run and walk; the hands to lift and carry, and wield the implements of various toil; the fingers to weave their tissues of cunning art; the muscles to strain at their tasks, to hold us erect under weight and pressure. So has every faculty of the mind its adjustment to its own sphere of action, its own specific work to do. The soul, with all its mazy wheelwork of affections, passions, and desires, its reasoning, its electing, its willing, is an executive creature, sent forth complete

B

from the hand of its Maker, to resolve, to dare, to do.

The Bible will not suffer us to think any Christian training rightly directed that does not aim to produce a laborious, vigorous workman for Christ, or any Christian character symmetrical and Scriptural that is merely intelligent of truth and doctrine, and is not also in earnest practically to bring something to pass as a servant of the good Master. Simply to hear the will of God is not enough. To hear just for the furnishing of the mind with the noblest and purest intellectual food, or for the correction or confirmation of our faith, this does not satisfy the breadth of the demand. We are to master and possess truth, that it may be our guide and our prompter in duty. We are to edit and put forth our belief in forms of holy living.

The inefficacy of the preaching of the Gospel is explained in its immediate causes, by this one fact more than by all others, that so many who sit beneath its appeals are satisfied to be hearers only. They depart from the sanctuary when the discourse is ended, with the complacent feeling that they have done well. They have sat out the hour; they have paid a public deference to the ordinance; they have even been wakeful and interested auditors. And there they stop, as if that were all God could require, or they had to render.

Let a householder call his servants together, and explain his plans of improving his estate. Yonder marsh, he says, is to be drained; that field overgrown with briers and thorns to be subdued for pasturage; that piece of fallow ground to be broken up with the plough; that stony level to be cleared, and laid down to meadow grass; around that arid hill-side a stream of water is to be led; and so he possesses them with his instructions. And the servants listen attentively and respectfully. One admires the breadth and wisdom of the arrangements proposed. One wishes to understand each particular processits methods-its effects. One is curious to learn what is to be done with a piece of woodland and an orchard, and a rocky knoll, and a little dark glen about which the proprietor has said nothing. And another is eager to find something in these instructions that shall confirm his own previous notions

of farming, and he will see nothing else, or he will reject the whole as visionary and impracticable. But none of them go to work. They retire from their master's presence, each to dig his own little garden plot. When will the estate put on the beauty, fertility, and luxuriance with which its lord meant to clothe it? Our readers can interpret the parable. When will the wastes of earth be redeemed-when will its arid places be watered-when will its wilderness bud and blossom as the rose, if they who are instructed in the will of the great Proprietor, who are sent by him a-field to carry out his improvements, who are given each his task, content themselves with hearing, admiring, criticising, curiously questioning, and leave the work undone?

Is it not known to us that the type of faith which we hold is stigmatized as discarding a righteousness of works? and with that the works themselves, as concerning itself rather with doctrines, creeds, and orthodoxies, than practical morals? There is only one way to wipe out this reproach. It is to strip for labour, to bare the brawny arm, to harden the palm, to lavish life on charities, and beneficences, and humanities, and generosities, and philanthropies, as if the price of the soul lay thus in the right hand; in a word, to show our faith a living faith by our works.

Is it not known to us that the sincerity of our belief is questioned through our inactivity? If you believe as you profess, says the caviller, that the soul is in peril of eternal death, you could not rest, you could not eat, or drink, or sleep, or do aught but rush to and fro to warn and rescue your fellow men. This truth, and our sincerity in holding it, need more, infinitely more, of this very sort of vindicating. We should be more in earnest, more enterprising, more alert and active to bear this witness to our faith, to take hold of imperilled souls, to rouse them from false and fatal securities, to point them to the swift-coming doom, to snatch them as brands from the burning. Can there be any doubt that this were the most triumphant demonstration of an orthodox belief?

Oh, when shall truth be obeyed as well as heard? How little is it expected that any sermon shall take full effect; that every prodigal shall arise at its

voice, and say, "I will go unto my Father;" that every idler shall harness himself to work; every drone wake his inert, slumbering strength; the slack gird their loins anew for the race; the erring forsake the lie which their right hand clasps; and all men welcome God's rule in them and over them! Why, there is truth enough preached and heard every Sabbath in the year, if it were also done, to make every Sabbath the birthday of a nation, to lift the dead earth into the joy and beauty of a renovated life, to girdle round the world with light and praise.

THE VALUE OF TIME. MANY and varied have been the estimates of men in reference to time. This difference of valuation has doubtless arisen from the ever-varying aspects which, under different circumstances in the experience of men, it has been made to assume. Granting that it is valuable; that, like silver or gold, it is an object of desire, and that, could it be earned, it would be one, too, of pursuit; granting this, it must be evident that its value will be proportional to its extent; so that could we, by the aid of any arithmetic, determine the value of an hour or a year, we might then hope to ascertain with equal accuracy the real value of the whole term of our life.

But how differently from this is it regarded and estimated by the mass of men! Not only do different individuals think differently of the value of time, but the same individuals, under different circumstances, and at different and distant periods of life, regard and estimate differently too.

As a general thing, for example, the young,-blooming with health, and buoyant with hope,-think but little, and feel far less, of the importance and value of this precious boon. It is to such generally the veriest trifle; while to others, as the aged, the sick, the dying, and the dead, it appears invested with a value such as the language of mortals is inadequate to express. But is not time ever and equally valuable? Is it not inherently, intrinsically so, in itself? Or does it owe its importance and worth to the changing and passing circumstances of mankind? In other words, is one day or one hour more valuable than another? This is really an important question,

and one which deserves our deepest consideration. There is no doubt whatever but that the circumstances into which we are thrown, and over which we have no control, to ourselves, at least, necessarily and greatly affect the value of time; and this being the case, if it is true that one period of our life, one portion of our time, is really to us more valuable than another, it becomes a question of the highest importance, What is this period?-When is that time? Which and where are the golden links in the chain of life? Are they found in youth, in manhood, or in declining years? The question is important, and the answer is not difficult.

Much of our time, as that of infancy and old age, is little more or better than a mere blank on the page of life. During such periods, not only are we useless, but even burdensome to ourselves and others. These are days of weakness and darkness, and frequently they are many. To the latter of these periods the wise man evidently and strikingly alludes when he says, "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say I have no pleasure in them." And of the former the Psalmist speaks with equal clearness and significancy when he says, "Childhood and youth are vanity." We have therefore only to subtract the dawn and the decline, the opening and the close, from the short day of life, and we are at once presented with the most valuable portion of our fleeting time.

But from the lives of many, other and large subtractions must be made. Disease, originating with their birth, is their daily and sorrowful companion to the darksome tomb. In the experience of such, it would be difficult to determine the most valuable portion of their transient time. Such can hardly be said to live. Their existence is one dreary waste, sunless, sterile, desolate, and dark.

Others, again, though not wedded to disease, have nevertheless appointed them days and months of languishing and pain, so that the time which is most valuable, that which may be turned to the highest account, and which, by means of diligent and constant exertion, may result in mental and moral improvement, is short and precarious in the extreme.

But, as well as the brevity and uncertainty of time, there are other considerations which invest and stamp it with a value and importance unspeakable and supreme. While it is short and precarious, it is also and equally irrecoverable. In this respect it differs strikingly and widely from many, or from most of our temporal blessings. Property lost may be replaced; friendship destroyed may be renewed; and health, though injured, may sometimes be recovered: but time once past never returns, once wasted can never be redeemed. It is given to all, but it can be purchased by none. And surely it should never be forgotten that that which is thus irrecoverable; that, which when lost no ransom can restore, is necessarily ever and rapidly wasting away. As we cannot recall it when past, so neither can we retain it when present. While we think of it, it is departing from us; so that however much or little may yet be granted us, it is certain that what remains was never so limited as at the present moment.

If time be regarded as a possession, none of us was ever so poor as at the present hour; and yet, regardless of this solemn and striking truth, how many are there who

"Quite unfurnish'd for the world to come, Are counting on long years of pleasure here!"

But can anything be more unwise or irrational than this? To depend, indeed, on that which is really possessed, that which we have earned with our own hands, and to which, therefore, we lay claim as our right, is altogether uncertain and unsafe; "riches make to themselves wings and fly away." But to depend upon that which we never possessed, which in no sense was ever ours, and to the possession of which we had consequently never even the shadow of a right,-to do this, can be regarded only as an act of the most egregious and consummate folly; and yet such is the conduct of those who arrogate to themselves an hour of the future.

We are

debtors alike for the present and the past, for "it is of the Lord's mercies we are not consumed."

But that which invests time with the utmost value and importance to man, is the fact that it is given to prepare him for another and higher state

of being in the world to come. This one thought, apart from every other, confers infinite worth on each passing hour. If there were no hereafter,

"If, when men die, they cease to be,

Returning to the barren womb of nothing, Whence they sprang,"

then might we say with somewhat of propriety, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." But not only is there a hereafter, an ever-advancing, yet unending future, but (as we have already intimated) that hereafter is closely and inseparably connected with, and related to, the present. It is the day of the dawn; the manhood of infancy; the harvest of seed-time and thus it is with regard even to the few fleeting years of our present passing life.

Even now, in the experience of mortals, the past, the present, and the future are not only conjoined, but are found necessarily and greatly influencing each other. This is true of our entire being. Physically, mentally, and morally, "the child is father to the man." In other words, the present and the future find and leave us what the past has made us. What we

are now, may be anything but what we might and ought to have been; nevertheless, it is the result or product of the past, and will assuredly and greatly influence the future. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Nor is there a day or an hour of our present, any more than of our future life, during which either this sowing or reaping is known to cease.

The present world has been fitly represented as one great school, in connection with which there are neither truants nor holidays. But in this

school, though there are no truants, there are many triflers. With how many does time hang as a heavy weight; and notwithstanding that every plan is devised, and every expedient resorted to to relieve it of its tediousness, and to make it pass pleasantly, after all it is a burden grievous to be borne. But for such individuals, time will soon have counted its last revolution, when that fearful futurity, for which the present is given to discipline and prepare them, will burst on their vision like a volcano charged and burning to its very centre.

To learn, then, the value of time, we must regard it especially in relation to the future, as that which is given to fit