t
the highest gifts of God's grace and the greatest truths of God's
Word are meant to regulate the tiniest things in our daily life. It
is no degradation to the lightning to have to carry messages. It is
no profanation of the sun to gather its rays into a burning glass to
light a kitchen fire with. And it is no unworthy use of the Divine
Spirit that God gives to His children, to say it will keep a man from
hasty and precipitate decisions as to little things in life, and from
chopping and changing about, with a levity of purpose and without a
sufficient reason. If our religion is not going to influence the
trifles, what is it going to influence? Our life is made up of
trifles, and if these are not its field, where is its field? You may
be quite sure that, if your religion does not influence the little
things, it will never influence the great ones. If it has not power
enough to guide the horses when they are at a slow, sober walk, what
do you think it will do when they are at a gallop and plunging? 'He
that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.' So
let us see to two things--first, that all our religion is worked into
our life, for only so much of it as is so inwrought is our
religion--and, second, that all our life is brought under the sway of
motives derived from our religion: for only in proportion as it is,
will it be pure and good.

And as regards this special virtue and prime quality of steadfastness
and fixedness of purpose, you can do no good in the world without it.
Unless a man can hold his own, and turn an obstinate negative to the
temptations that lie thick about him, he will never come to any good
at all, either in this life or in the next. The basis of all
excellence is a wholesome disregard of externals, and the cultivation
of a strong self-reliant and self-centred, because God-trusting and
Christ-centred, will. And I tell you, especially you young men and
women, if you want to do or be anything worth doing or being, you
must try to get your natures hardened into being 'steadfast,
unmovable.' There is only one infallible way of doing it, and that is
to let the 'strong Son of God' live in you, and in Him to find your
strength for resistance, your strength for obedience, your strength
for submission. 'I have set the Lord always before me; because He is
at my right hand, I shall not be moved.'

There are two types of men in the world. The one has his emblem in
the chaff, rootless, wit