And it is the will of God,--that great, resistless, and unceasing force,
working underneath all our human wills--it is the will of God
manifesting itself in small things as well as in those that seem
outwardly more important, that has grouped all these special things
together and sent them on an especially busy morning. Shall not one
rejoice and recognize that the need of another is brought as a privilege
to himself? The blessedness of giving is not limited to cheques and
bank-bills. There are gifts that far transcend these,--gifts of
patience, sympathy, thought, and counsel, and (such is the blessedness
of the Divine Law) these are gifts that the poorest can give. The need
on the one side may be the luxury on the other, for it invites
sympathetic comprehension and the enlargement of friendly relations. And
as for one's time,--even in a full and busy life,--it is not so much
time that one requires as it is right conditions. An hour will do the
work of a day, when the conditions are harmonious; and nothing so
increases the degree of spiritual energy as the glow and ardor and joy
of doing some little service for another. In this lies the real
blessedness, the real luxury of life, and one reads the profound
significance in the words of Maeterlinck: "It is well to believe that
there needs but a little more courage, more love, more devotion to life,
a little more eagerness, one day to fling open wide the portals of joy
and truth." These qualities redeem the temporal to the immortal, for
immortality is a condition of the soul, not a definite period in time.
The soul, now and here, may put on immortality. Life is, after all, an
affair of the immortal self, and it is the invisible powers which are
its stay, its guide, and its inspiration. We live and move and have our
being on the divine side of things. We only live--in any true sense--as
we are filled with the heavenly magnetism. "Thou hast made known to me
the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance,"
says the apostle. Here is the true gospel to live by. There _are_ "ways
of life;" even through toil and trial they shall be reached. The one is
eternal, the other temporal. It is unwise to lay too much stress on the
infelicities of the moment. Exaltation alone is real; depression is
unreal. The obstacle before one is not intended to stop progress, but to
stimulate new energies to the overcoming.

"By living so purely in thought and in deed as to