plenty of both heart and thought, and that they will
shed around them a full supply of that sunshine which the weather seems so
determined to deny us! I suppose we must allow, with Southey's old woman,
that "any weather is better than none," but it is incontestable that we
seem likely to have every opportunity afforded us, during these holidays,
at all events, of

"Making a sunshine in a _shady_ place."

Sunday.

In many ways this is a disquieting age in which to live, and yet it is
also markedly hopeful. It is true that the power of authority and of
custom is crumbling on many sides, but surely this should lead to the
laying of deeper and truer foundations. In this very question of Sunday,
the Fourth Commandment used to settle the question, whereas now we
investigate its origins and claims in a way which sounds rebellious and
unfilial. Yet it may be nearer the mind of Christ than unthinking
obedience, for the servant accepts with blind obedience this or that rule
spoken by his master; the friend, the son, strives to understand "his
father's innermost mind." He may or may not be convinced that certain
words spoken on Mount Sinai, about the Jewish Sabbath, were intended to
refer to the Christian Sunday; but, in either case, he realizes the nature
of the spiritual life, and perceives that worship and thought and time are
essential to it. He sees that the old Jewish rule tends to develop this
spiritual life, and therefore, until he finds a better way, he feels it
morally binding on himself; not because it was a Jewish rule, but because
it assists his own growth.

Suppose a master admired a bed of lilies and said, "Let me always find
some here;" if a landslip destroyed that bed, a slave might feel absolved
from further trouble about lilies, but the son would say, "No; we can give
my father what he wants by growing them elsewhere--it was not so much the
bed, as the lilies, that he really cared for."

God will look in us for the lilies of peace and spiritual-mindedness,
which only grow where there is what the old Babylonians called "a Sabbath
of the heart." Are we to feel absolved from responding to His demand
because old Jewish ways have vanished? When St. Paul speaks so slightingly
of "times and seasons and Sabbaths," does he mean that the worship and
meditation belonging to such seasons were valueless? No; he is rather
saying, "How can you think that our Father values, not the lilies, but
only the fact of