has given-health, sickness, youth, age-any power of pleasing or influencing others, every relationship of life, every moment of time, are stamped with the seal of God, and things once dust and dross, now linked with God and eternity, are sacred and priceless.

Who can tell of that baptismal season? As well might one attempt to describe that moment when, led from darkness into light, the soul could say, "My Father and my God."

Then, women who had sat for years at Jesus' feet and learned of Him realized for the first time the power of an indwelling Christ. Then was heard a call to special service, in tones as clear as was the voice of the Master to Mary on the resurrection morning, and, following, they were able to join with Bryant in his ecstatic song: "We have had our turn, have been lifted from the darkness of the clod, and for one glorious moment have seen the brightness of the skirts of God."

Such women were renewed, recreated, and went forth obedient to the will and the word of their Lord. The Spirit led on from shore to shore, until there is not a state or territory where the voice is not heard; from shore to shore, until England and Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the continents of Europe, of Asia and of Africa, with the islands of the sea, are bound together with the white ribbon in the name of the Lord.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the world is the lineal descendant of the Crusade. We have more or less observed the anniversary from year to year, but two decades will have passed when it shall come again. We shall be within a single year of our majority-twenty years of mercy and blessing from our Lord. Ofttimes we have grieved Him.

"The mistakes of our life have been many,
The sins of our heart have been more."

But He has not cast us off! He bids us come again to the fountain, and receive a fresh enduement of His Spirit for the service of the last year of our minority, that coming to the fullness of our responsibility we may be found "reaching forth unto those things which are before," as we "press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling in Christ Jesus."

Surely not a woman will be unmindful of such proffered blessing! Does some one say, "It will be so near the holidays!" No Christmas was ever so joyous as that on which women celebrated not alone the birth of Christ to the world, but the birth of Christ to power of service in their own souls; when added to gifts bestowed on loved ones of earth, the gift of self was made to Him. Glad should we be that the joy of the one anniversary may illume the other, and will not cease when the New Year shall come, but will be a continual possession, for then "our life shall be hid with Christ in God."

Yours in Crusade bonds,

MARY A. WOODBRIDGE, National Corresponding Secretary. Wonderful Crusade! that, with its "sober, second thought," the W. C. T. U., is already belting the world with its holy influence. It is pouring the white light of the Gospel upon the public conscience of the nations, and lifting the moral sentiment of kings and peoples into the radiance that streams from the Cross. In that day men shall walk the earth in sobriety and righteousness, families shall dwell together in peace, and all peoples shall know the Lord, for

"Right is right, since God is God,

And right the day must win.
To doubt would be disloyalty,

To falter would be sin."

We have found the following, written by Mrs. Mary T. Lathrap a score of years after the Crusade, which may well be inserted here. It will awaken added interest now since both Mary Woodbridge and Mary Lathrap are among the translated:

"Twenty years since the bell outrung-
Twenty years since the song was sung,
Twenty years since the tainted air-
Of the hall of death-

With its poison breath

Its drunken revel, and fell despair,

Was smitten through by a woman's prayer;
When love and pain under holy spell

Asked for their own at the doors of hell."

"The noble, great ones, gone!" What though the hope of immortality stirs our souls, that we know they dwell in fairer regions, and in their joy rejoice? Still the battle seems a little sterner set since they are off the field, and between us and them lies that silence across which life's common language may not reach. What wonder, then, that memory, mute-lipped and tender-eyed, holds our hearts in thrall as, pausing, we look back over the way of the years! A sadder thing must memory note, that some have withdrawn from the yet unfinished battle, and camp to-day on the ground of ease and compromise.

Crusaders of '73, afraid of the stern issue they themselves raised, in its logical outcome in '93. Leaders of '73, whose trumpet-call to the defense of principles not yet victorious, rang across the world, silent and inactive in '93. Comrades of '73, pledged in a fight to the finish, for "God and Home and Native Land," out of the ranks in '93, or doing dress-parade duty on non-combative ground. Time makes savage analysis of character, and develops or rots the fibre of it, according to quality.

The farewells to our faithful dead are jubilant peans compared with those spoken to such as falter in danger, or betray by any stress of temptation, a cause like that for which the white ribbon is a token.

At our stone of remembrance this year let a great prayer ascend for a call as divine and clear, a separation as complete, daring and unselfish, and a purpose as single and definite, as gave to us this anniversary. Memory sings out of the past:

"Moved by loving and stung by pain,
Poor with losses, from vigils vain-

Swift from the homes whence life had filed,
Where hope was smitten and love lay dead-

Women bereft went out to cry

In the ear of the world as it trampled by:

We've watched and tended, have loved and prayed,

But stronger than we are the snares they laid.

To a guilty nation we now make moan,

And seek at the doors of hell our own.' 999

This is the issue and the battle-cry which lying on the hushed lips of memory, is taken up by the thrilling voice of Prophecy as she looks on the future into which our cause is leading and our feet must go.

O

No single experience could well make a more marked

change in a woman's life than that night's trial effort at public speaking. If one is at all given to looking at life seriously from the standpoint of duty and obligation, the first really successful public address, and especially if

• From a volume presented to Mrs. Woodbridge by the author, A. A. Hopkins.

it be the maiden effort, fills one with a strange, solemn sense of being set apart for some high and sacred purpose.

This was eminently true of Mrs. Woodbridge. She was still humble and utterly void of self-seeking. That beautiful trait of humility, as rare as it was beautiful in one so pre-eminently successful, remained with her to the last, and, if anything, deepened with the years. But she at once accepted all opportunities to speak for her Master that were providentially opened to her; and they came without limit. She knew that, with all her gifts of which she could not have been wholly unconscious, she must still serve an apprenticeship; and no one ever did it more faithfully. At once the country churches around began to call upon her, and she would speak to them on any subject chosen. It was a time when women's auxiliary missionary societies were first organized to help the great mission boards. The Chautauqua Assembly, a child of the Crusade, as the reader has seen, gave a quickening impulse to Sabbath school work. These and the temperance work brought abundance of calls to speak to all who could or would respond. Mrs. Woodbridge girded her soul for work. She betook herself to her Bible and her books with a zeal never felt before. It was done now in Jesus' name and for His dear sake with a deeper spirit of conscious consecration than formerly. She joined a Chautauqua circle and was one of the first graduates. She spoke almost weekly for Sabbath school work, or missions or temperance, and sometimes daily even in those first months after the Crusade.

She pursued for some time the study of Hebrew that she might better understand the commentaries on her blessed Bible. No opportunity to do work for Christ or humanity was ever slighted, and no occasion was ever too insignificant for her to do her best. To the last she retained that sweet spirit of her Master, who, with equal