nd comfort, the strain of which on a man's nervous energy is
worse than anything else in the world, and how at the close of the day He
went into the little boat, took the hard cushion on which the steersman
sat, threw it down in the bottom of the boat, and laid Himself down with
His head on that hard cushion and slept like a child through the rocking of
the boat and the roaring of the storm, until His disciples came to Him
saying, "Lord, save us: we perish." There is not one man in a thousand who
could do that work or could put out one-tenth part of that nervous energy
and then sleep like that. Anybody who thinks that the Prophet of Nazareth
was a weak or a feeble man has made the mistake of his life. He was perfect
physically or He never could have done His work.

All this work of developing a steady nerve, of developing the vital organs
for the use of the muscles, has been going on until the child is nine or
ten years old. It has been going on very rapidly, and in as much as the
exercise has been suitable, as his digestion has been good, his growth has
been very rapid. During the first three years of its life the child
increases its weight more than three-fold. During the next three years it
adds over forty per cent. to this amount and between six and nine adds over
thirty per cent. more; and when the boy is about eleven years old, or the
girl is about ten, then the growth almost stops that year. It drops to a
minimum. I call your attention to this thought: the minimum growth is more
in a girl than in a boy. A girl is always more precocious than a boy. She
is a year older than he at nine or ten, and when she is fourteen, fifteen,
sixteen, she is two years older than the boy. When the girl is ten and the
boy eleven, growth drops to the minimum. Why is that? Nature is economizing
her material and husbanding her resources against the trying years which
are to come.

You remember the story of the time when Pharoah in his dream saw the seven
fat kine followed and devoured by the seven lean kine; he was told that his
dream signified seven years of plenty, to be followed by seven years of
famine, and was advised to store up the harvests of the good years against
the hard times to follow. This is a picture of the child's life. The first
seven years of the child's life are years of plenty, when it is storing up
material for the years of hard trial, the years of famine, which are close
at hand.

I am going to talk most of the