h looks too hard is, as indeed it happens very often, some duty
of our social life, should we feel as if the world were against us, and
we were standing alone, let us not forget God's word of final
encouragement to his prophet, "Yet have I left me seven thousand in
Israel who have not bowed to Baal."

It is a word for all time. If ever you are fighting for the good, and
growing weary in the fight, the thought may rise in you that you seem to
be fighting alone, and that everything is against you, just because you
cannot see the seven thousand who are in the same ranks, and on your
side.

In the darkest hour of Israel's history we are thus told of an indefinite
multitude who had stood firm in the faith of their fathers, untouched and
untainted by adverse influence, and the recollection of it should serve
to strengthen and encourage every individual who is really jealous for
that which is good.

Let us, then, take the warning, and nurse it as a gift of God, and go
forward where duty calls us, sometimes faint, it may be, and sometimes
weary, but still pursuing.

VII. PRIVATE PRAYER, AND PUBLIC WORSHIP.

"And, as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath
day."--ST. LUKE iv. 16.

"He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there He
prayed."--ST. MARK i. 35.

These two texts set before us our Saviour's habit in regard to public and
private spiritual exercise; and they suggest to us the question, What
have we, on our part, to say of these two elements in our own life? These
texts, we bear in mind, represent not something casual or intermittent in
the life of our Lord. They stand in the record of it as a typical,
essential, inseparable part of His habitual practice. What we have to
remember about them is that, whereas all men recognise in the life of
Jesus the one unique example in human history of a life which is morally
perfect and immaculate, if we were to take these out of it, the customary
share in all common worship, and the private, separate communing with
God, it would be an altogether different life--different in its attitude
towards the common life of ordinary men, and different in its own quality
and influence.

We might still admire--nay, we could not but admire--all the beauty of
moral qualities, the purity, the sympathy, the love and self-devotion of
it; but it would have lost its spiritual atmosphere. It would no longer
be for us the life of the Divine