ing directions. Let the soul find its true refreshment
and infinitely sustaining tide of energy in God, and immediately "old
things have passed away," and "all have become new," and life is full of
exhilaration and joy. "Every day we ought to renew our purpose, saying
to ourselves: This day let us make a sound beginning, for what we have
hitherto done is naught." Every day is a new and definite re-entrance
upon life. Nor is it worth while to linger too much on the mistakes, the
errors of yesterday. True, the consequences of errors and mistakes
linger in life until they are worked out; but the working out is, after
all, only a question of time and of unfaltering persistence in the
upward way, and thus a new foundation of life is laid: "old things have
passed away and all things have become new." It is in the serene and
joyous exaltation of life alone that one truly lives; in that sweetness
of mutual trust and generous aims and over-flowing love that radiates
its joy and beauty to all with whom it comes in contact, and which is
perpetually fed and perpetually renewed by the constant communion of the
soul with God.

On the New Year's eve of 1902 there was a wonderful phenomenon
transpiring in the stellar universe, which continued during several
weeks. That night was one of the utmost beauty. The air was as clear as
crystal, and the constellation of Orion gleamed and sparkled like a
colossal group of diamonds against an azure background. The entire sky
was a scene of unparalleled grandeur and magnificence. The superb
constellations of Orion and Ursa Major (familiarly known as the
"Dipper") blazed with an intense brilliancy that seemed the very
incarnation and concentration of electric vitality. Five of the stars in
Ursa Major were then receding from our atmosphere at the rate of twenty
thousand miles a second; the other two were approaching; and the
phenomenon of these weeks was in the changing aspect of that
constellation which the astronomers hold will require some two thousand
years to complete. Then will Ursa Major, as seen from the earth, be
entirely changed. Such facts as these, and the speculation they suggest,
offer to us a new basis for the contemplation of life. If it require a
period of two thousand years to produce the appreciable change of
grouping in a constellation whose stars are moving at the rate of twenty
thousand miles a second, this fact indicates to us the infinite spaces
and the unlimited time in whic