shame, we can bear all, and be all, while we rest in God, and look up to our great Forerunner, whose life, from the time he came forth to help us bear our burdens was one long pain, the thorn always hurting; that so we might learn how the way to the loftiest life in heaven may lie through the roughest ways of earth. ""Tis alone of His appointing That our feet on thorns have trod; Only bring us nearer God. "Strength sublime may rise from weakness, Nor are life's divinest labors Ony wold by songs of praise.” III. EVERY MAN A PENNY. MATTHEW XX. 9: "He gave every man a penny." 1. SUPPOSE We have all noticed the curious diversity of the seeds we sow in the spring. There are some that shoot out and grow up days before the others from the same paper, sown in the same bed, and that seemed exactly like the rest. It is so with a number of fruit trees in a young orchard. Each tree may get an equal care, and appear to have the same natural advantages, but one will spring out into an early fruitfulness, while another holds back, summer after summer, and perhaps, only when the husbandman begins to despair of its ever doing any good, it bears fruit. It is so with boys. One lad will be bright and promising, the joy of his tutor, and the pride of his mother, right from the start; no one can tell exactly how he learned his letters; they seemed to come to him by instinct; he knew them when he saw them, or, as Plato would say, he re-collected them. But another lad, on the same form, perhaps in the same family, is dull and backward; he has quite forgotten his first letters before he learned the last. But after a good while there is the dawn of a new day; then the backward boy has a whole sunrise to himself, and opens out into an equal manhood with the best of his brighter fellows. It is so again with woman in the experiences and life of the heart. A shrinking, retir. ing, near-sighted woman waits and waits among the Yorkshire hills, saying, wistfully, to herself, "What shall I do?" It has been a long, sore trial to wait and watch as she has done. In her lifetime she has known not a few of her own age who have long since solved that problem: some are wedded and happy in their homes; others have found their true place as teachers, writers, or artists, and are crowned already with honor. This woman has had great sorrows, and sore losses, and her day is wearing on into the af ternoon, still she has heard no voice bidding her go work in the vineyard. There is a letter written to Wordsworth while she stands there in the market-place waiting for the Master, that is, in my opinion, the most pathetic cry ever heard in our lifetime. "Sir," she says, "Sir," she says, "I earnestly entreat you to read and judge what I have sent you. From the day of my birth to this day I have lived in seclusion here among the hills, where I could neither know what I was nor what I could do. I have read, for the reason that I have eaten bread, because it was a real craving of nature, and have written on the same principle. But now I have arrived at an age when I must do something. The powers I possess must be used to a certain end; and as I do not know them myself, I must ask others what they are worth: there is no one here to tell me if they are worthy; and if they are worthless, there is no one to tell me that. I beseech you to help me." What she sends to Wordsworth then, is poor; she has written many volumes, all poor; has waited in the market-place and done no work; but at last, the Master, walking there, sees her wistful face turned towards him, and says, " Go into my vineyard." Then she bends over some small folded sheets of coarse paper until her face almost touches them, and in one book she storms the heart of England and America, and in the one hour that was left her she won her penny. Another woman sits in her room in pleasant old Canterbury; her life has been lonely also, and she says to herself, "What shall I do?" She feels about and finds a pen, and it is not hard to see that there is a gift of God in the things sho is doing long before she takes her great place; still it is only waiting. The Master comes, and the voice says, "Go work in my vineyard." Then, as she wiles us with the story of a woman, who was a Methodist and a preacher, and tells of the fortunes of those who were subject to her irresistible sway, she opens such hidden wells of tender truth and goodness, and dear homely humanity, as this world hardly believed could be treasured in its heart in these latter days; and now in other books following that, she has gone into the first rank of those that work for God in that corner of his vineyard, and has won her penny. It is so again in the world of men. One man starts ahead, and distances all about him; he will never have an equal, is the verdict of the world; another, of the same age, stands where he was placed. At last something stirs him, and he starts too; and while the first man never stops, the last comes up |