on at its best is a habit, too! We are sometimes too ready to
discount the worth of the habitual in our religious life. We put a premium
on self-consciousness. We reduce the life of faith to a series of acts of
faith of varying difficulty and import, but each detached from the rest and
individually apprehended of the soul. Surely this is all wrong. In our
physical life we are least conscious of those functions that are most vital
and continuous, and the more perfectly they do their work the less we think
about them. The analogy is incomplete and must be drawn with care. But when
you have conceded that faith has to be acquired, that it has to be learned,
there is still this much in the analogy. If faith is a long and hard
lesson, the value of the lesson to us is not the effort with which we learn
it, but the ease with which we apply it. The measure of conscious effort in
our faith is the measure of our faith's weakness. When faith has become a
spontaneity of our character, when it turns to God instinctively, when it
does its work with the involuntariness of habit, then it has become strong.

_Pour out your heart before Him._ How this singer understood the office and
privilege of the 'all times' trust! He knew that there is a fullness of
heart that is ill to bear. True, in more than one simple way the full heart
can find some slight relief. There is work. The full heart can go out and
do something. There is a brother's trouble in which a man may partly forget
his own. There is sympathy. Surely few are so lonely that they cannot find
any one ready to offer the gift of the listening ear, any one willing to
share with them all of pain and burden that can be shared. Ah! but what of
that which cannot be shared? What of the sorrow that has no language, and
the shame and confusion that we would not, and even dare not, trail across
a friend's mind? So often the heart holds more than ever should be poured
out into another's ear. There are in life strained silences that we could
not break if we would. And there is a law of reticence that true love and
unselfishness will always respect. If my brother hath joy, am I to cloud it
with my grief? If he hath sorrow, am I to add my sorrow unto his? When our
precious earthly fellowship has been put to its last high uses in the hour
of sorrow or shame, the heart has still a burden for which this world finds
no relief. But there is another fellowship. There is God our Father. There
is the ear of