world of grace and truth that culminates on Calvary. It is sacrifice in its uttermost simplicity, in words, as it were, of one syllable, fitted for babes in Christ. No more may we presume that there is not the divine observation of the human action on this lake shore that there was on that mountain top. The human eyes of Christ, as they looked with such tenderness on that sight, these human eyes were but the organisms through which God was watching, and the judgment pronounced when the deeds were done was from the judgment-seat of the Most High. So it is forever and ever. The divine eyes are watching us, with or without the human organism, and the words are said about us all sorrowfully when we are selfish and small, sweetly when we are selfforgetful and self-sacrificing. You may make a sacrifice, and feel very sad you could not do more, and go home when it is made, feeling that the thing is not worth a thought, and be glad to forget it yourselves, and only to remember the great gifts of the rich and generous, yet shall the last be first, and the least greatest. You shall say, Lord, when did I give two mites which make one farthing? and he shall say, You gave it at such a

time, and went without such a piece of your life that you might be able; and these shall say, That was when I gave my shekels; now will the Lord surely say, here is a crown of glory, and they shall cry out, "See what I gave, what I did at that very time;" and he shall say, It is not here; the angel has not made any record of it; it must have been out of your abundance; and we never reckon here the cup that was filled out of the

ocean.

And if you say, we know all this already, and you have told us very much the same things before, I must still put you back, dear friends, on your own inner sense of what is right, and remind you of Paul's great word: "If thine heart condemn thee, God is greater than thine heart, and knoweth all things." If your heart has nothing to say about your duty to do more and to be more, and you know it is alive to the work God gives us all to do, then I am dumb. I want you only to put yourselves in the line of this holy and beautiful thing, this gem in the setting of the Gospels, to be sure that your gift to God is the gift of a part of yourself in every. thing you are called to give.

XV.

OLD AGE.

PA. 9:"Such an one as Paul the aged."

OLD age is the repose of life, the rest that precedes the rest that remains. It is the Seventh day, which is the Sabbath of a whole lifetime, when the tired worker is bidden to lay aside the heavy weight of his care about this world, -to wash himself of its dust and grime, and walk about with as free a heart as a forehanded farmer carries into his fields of a Sunday afternoon, at the end of harvest. For "old age should be peaceful," Dr. Arnold says, "as childhood is playful; hard work at either extreme of life is out of place. You must labor in the hot sun of noon, but the evening should be quiet and cool. It is the holy place of life, the chapel of ease for all men's weary labors."

But it has been the misfortune of old age to be generally unwelcome, with some noble 9X.

ceptions among those who can see how nature never makes a mistake about time. The aged would rather be younger, and the young admire most in the old what they call their youthfulness; so that, "How he seems!" is our

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finest praise of an old man, and "How old I feel!" is very often the old man's most pitiful complaint.

Now and then we come across a beautiful and contented old age, in which those who possess it seem to be aware how good that blessing is which can only come through a long lifetime, and give what their age has brought them. Such persons surprise us that we should ever have been content to admire in any old man or woman merely their poor traces of youth, while what is so much better than youth makes up the substance of every well-ripened life. It is as if one would persist in admiring the shrivelled petals that linger at the end of an apple, because they retain about them the dim memory of a blossom, and care nothing for the fruit that has come through their withering.

I am not to deny that we can find reason enc ugh if we want it for this idea. There is plenty

of evidence, to those that care to hunt for it, ou the misfortune of growing old, from that outcry of the heathen, "Those the gods love die young," to the moan of the last man we found weary of his life, but loath to leave it. We can see sometimes in those who are growing old all about us such an isolation, passing at last into desolation, and such utter inability to bear up against the burden of the years, that we pray in our hearts we may be saved from an old age like that. Then we remember how Solomon called these the evil days, when we shall say we have no pleasure in them; and how a great philosopher wrote in the diary of his old age, "Very miserable;" and we can see Milton, sitting in the sun alone, old, blind, stern, and poor; and Wordsworth, walking in his old age by Rydal-water, but no longer conscious of the glory and joy of which he had sung in his prime; and a host besides, to whom old age has brought, as Johnson said, only decrepitude; and then we say with Lamb, "I do not want to be weaned by age, and drop like mellow fruit into the grave." We shrink back at our whitening hairs, and wonder how anybody could ever