x. 16). No talk of rewards and gains at
first. He knew the men. He knew their eagerness to do what was right
and to obey the voice of God. Men who have the right spirit, men with
some fire of enthusiasm, do not need crowns held before them to draw
them into the true and noble way. They are almost glad to think that
crosses and self-sacrifices await them in that way. Christ spoke no
words at the beginning about gains and rewards. Come, because I want
you, and God asks you, and it is your duty: but afterwards, when they
had obeyed His call, He talked to them often about the gains. They had
begun to understand them then. There is no man who hath left anything
for My sake, who shall not receive a hundredfold in this present time,
and in the world to come, life everlasting.

And we all learn in a measure what that means, when we have faithfully
served Christ for a little time. You talk about the sacrifices and
losses of the Christian life. Yes, but no man is fit to be called a
Christian who has not found in Christ ten or twenty times as much joy
as he has lost. If there were no hereafter, no future crowns at all,
it would be a terrible disappointment, but even, apart from that, the
present life of every one who believes in Christ and does Christ's
work, and loves as Christ loved, is richer, fuller, wider, and happier
in almost every way than the life which knows Him not. What about the
hundred talents? you say, and I answer with the prophet, "_The Lord is
able to give thee much more than this_."

JABEZ

BY REV. J. G. GREENHOUGH, M.A.

"And Jabez was more honourable than his brethren."--1 CHRON. iv, 9.

This is a curious fragment of biography, half-hidden in a dreary mass
of wholly uninteresting names. We cannot conjecture how it got there.
It seems to have no connection either with what comes before or what
follows. It is like a sweet little poem in the midst of a dry,
genealogical chart; or like a real, living face with the flush of warm
colour in it, speaking amid endless rows of mummies or waxwork effigies.

It is indeed the short, incomplete story of a life with neither
beginning nor end. We are not told who his father was, or who his
mother was, or what tribe or family he belonged to. Not a word about
origin, descent, pedigree. And there seems to be a purpose in this.
For the sacred writer at this point is doing nothing else but tracing
pedigrees. These four chapters are to us the mo