great railways of Britain. He that anxiously guards against the wants of old age is cut down in his early prime. The feeble son outlives his robust brother. The petted child is snatched away from the toilsome provision for his future; and they who have dreaded only the death of their child have sometimes been cursed in his life. How many a man has spent anxious hours and wakeful nights planning for emergencies that never came! - a fortress and cannon, but never the enemy; an anxious gaze into the dense northern fog, while the storm comes sweeping from the clear southern sky. Saith the Scripture, "as if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him."

There

(2) Fears and forebodings, while in the pathway of duty, are therefore superfluous and ineffectual. are two kinds of things, says a good maxim, about which we should never worry, the things we can help and the things we cannot help. Many a man carries on his shoulders a burden that God never placed there; he carries it for the love of groaning. A judicious foresight and a reasonable care will guard against impending evils that are within our province and our power. But fear disturbs alike the sight and the foresight. Its prevision is but poor vision; the thing that seems to be before the eye is in the eye. The mental astigmatism changes the fair circle into an oblong and a long-drawn line. The turbid humors see in the midge upon the windowpane a bird of prey in the air, in two gleams of phosphorescence by night the eyes of the tiger ready to spring. God is commonly better than a

good man's fears; and when foreseen evil actually comes it proves more manageable and tolerable than we apprehended. From some eminence in the highway you have looked out upon the road in advance, and it seemed a long and discouraging steep before you, as far as the eye could reach. But the formidableness of the climb vanished as you approached, and you mounted with comparative ease and moved on as before. So it is often in life. Most difficulties lessen and disappear when resolutely faced. When unmanageable and beyond control, fear is ineffectual and futile. Out on the ocean of life when the storm comes we can but reef the canvas, hold the helm to the course, and leave all to Him who holds the wind in his fists. The Alexandrian vessel went to pieces, but Paul got safe to land; Jonah in the fish was on the way to Nineveh; the Deluge could not drown the ark.

(3) Fears and forebodings react injuriously upon ourselves. They distract our efforts. They waste the great motive powers of our nature. A traitor has entered, and the stronghold of "Mansoul" is a kingdom divided against itself. The energy of action is lost in dissension, and the force that should have faced the foe is fighting within.

When fear comes hope goes. With hope goes courage-which, by derivation, is heartiness, and when heart and hope are gone, all is gone and failure comes. Despondency makes us timid and shrinking, and we settle down into a morose and repining helplessness and selfishness.

Forebodings of evil are a call for opposition. Birds of ill omen that flee from the ringing voice of spiritual health come at the croak of despondency and spiritual disease. They watch for the gloaming. Fear invites foes. I have seen a whole herd of cattle flee before one barking dog, which when fairly faced by the least and hindmost of the herd ran yelping away. And as the brute can quail before the human eye, and the brute force of the bully before the calm moral assurance of the manly soul, even so do superable obstacles and oppositions sink before the strong bright spirit of duty and of hope. The bird of prey shrinks to the midge on the windowpane, the grim terror of the darkness becomes again a decayed and blackened log, and the giant of the Hartz Mountains the traveler's own shadow cast upon the fog. Grant's supposed twenty howling wolves, when he came and counted them, were only two, and they ran.

II. Considered positively, Christian courage has all in its favor. (1) It concentrates the energies. The firm conviction that we are about our Master's business may well rule out all apprehensions and distractions and irresolutions. So long as I am in the king's highway, I have only to go forward, for no hostile thing can touch me in that path. Out of it I know not where I am or what shall befall. I have read of a hunter lost two days in the Rocky Mountains, wandering about, weary, famished, and at last aimless and well-nigh hopeless, and of the joy and the new life that spread through soul and body alike when he suddenly struck a guide

and path that led him straight to his camp. It was then one strong forward push. When one girds himself up to walk in the path of duty he is thereby girded with strength. Glimpses of the thought have dawned on the pagan mind. That was a proud inscription over the three hundred at Thermopyla: "O stranger, tell the Lacedemonians that here we lie, obedient to their laws." They saved Greece. And one of the noblest defenses ever made, rising almost to the Christian standpoint, was that of the great orator after the disastrous defeat of Charonea, when he not only showed that the course of his advising was the best that could be seen beforehand, but that had all those disasters risen before their faces as fixed facts their only course was to press forward as they did with manly breast and meet them.

And when such a spirit rises to the height of a Christian sense of obligation and determination it has a singular power to hold one together and hold him to his purpose, whether it be in the long laboring and waiting, as that of Wilberforce, forty years, for the Emancipation Act, and of the missionary Thomas, seventeen years, for his first convert in Bengal, and of the Moffats, who after ten years of rayless night among the Bechuanas of Africa ordered from England the communion set which three years later came on the day before their first six baptisms; or on sudden occasions as when in the English civil war Dr. Harris, surrounded by threats and with a carbine leveled at his head, calmly finished his sermon against

profane swearing; or as when in our own day the enraged slave catcher, pistol in hand, said to Isaac Hopper, "I will blow your brains out if you say another word," and received the quiet answer, "I do not believe thou hast the least intention of using thy pistol in that way, but thou art much agitated and may fire it accidentally; therefore I request thee not to point it toward me but to turn it the other way." There is nothing like Christian courage to give point, poise, and power to human life. To bore through the triple-plate iron armor of difficulty Christian courage is the heavy steel conical shot.

(2) Christian courage rallies and organizes support to the right. Those who have lived long are apt to be painfully impressed with the wisdom and activity of the men of this world in contrast with those of the children of light. The enthusiasm of the youth is chilled and repressed as he goes on. He sees hesitancy and timidity and inactivity in matters which seem to him of the clearest obligation and vital importance. Many a time it confronts him like an iceberg on the ocean voyage. But appearances here may be in part deceitful. What is lacking may be the leader or the mover. Good men are never all dead; they may be quiescent. Christian communities are often in the state of some saturated chemical solution. Drop into it a crystal and the whole crystallizes. A stanch Christian courage is that crystal. One clear, calm, selfpoised, God-directed, forceful spirit in church or community, in school or committee, in the assembly or the