Wonderful purpose that ne'er gave me up!
Wonderful patience, enduring and strong!
Wonderful glory to which I belong!

IF I HIM BUT HAVE

If I Him but have,
If he be but mine--
If my heart, hence to the grave,
Ne'er forgets his love divine--
Know I naught of sadness,
Feel I naught but worship, love, and gladness.

If I Him but have,
Glad with all I part;
Follow on my pilgrim staff,
My Lord, only, with true heart;
Leave them, nothing saying,
On broad, bright, and crowded highways straying.

If I Him but have,
Glad I fall asleep;
Aye the flood that his heart gave
Strength within my heart shall keep;
And with soft compelling
Make it tender, through and through it swelling.

If I Him but have,
Mine the world I hail!
Glad as cherub smiling, grave,
Holding back the Virgin's veil.
Sunk and lost in seeing,
Earthly cares have died from all my being.

Where I have but Him
Is my Fatherland,
And all gifts and graces come
Heritage into my hand;
Brothers long deplored
I in his disciples find restored.

--George Macdonald.

Quiet from God! How beautiful to keep
This treasure the All-merciful hath given;
To feel, when we awake or when we sleep,
Its incense round us like a breath from heaven.

To sojourn in the world, and yet apart;
To dwell with God, and still with man to feel;
To bear about forever in the heart
The gladness which his spirit doth reveal.

--Sarah J. Williams.

HIS CHOSEN ONES

Some souls there are, beloved of God,
Who, following where the saints have trod,
Learn such surrender of the will
They seem insensible of ill.

Yet, finely strung and sensitive,
They live far more than others live,
And grief's and pain's experience
Must be to them far more intense.

O mystery--that such can know
A life impregnable to woe!
O paradox that God alone
In secret proveth to his own!

It must be that supremest grace
So nerves them for the heavenly race
Their litanies are turned to psalms,
Their crosses, even here, to palms.

--Harriet McEwen Kimball.

When, courting slumber,
The hours I number,
And sad cares cumber
My weary mind,
This thought shall cheer me:
That thou art near me,
Whose ear to h