ouncement, "This year is to be to you
one of especial probation and discipline, with reference to perfecting
you for a heavenly state. Weigh well and consider every incident of your
daily life, for not one shall fall out by accident, but each one is to
be a finished and indispensable link in a bright chain that is to draw
you upward to the skies!"

With what new eyes should we now look on our daily lot! and if we found
in it not a single change,--the same old cares, the same perplexities,
the same uninteresting drudgeries still,--with what new meaning would
every incident be invested! and with what other and sublimer spirit
could we meet them? Yet, if announced by one rising from the dead with
the visible glory of a spiritual world, this truth could be asserted no
more clearly and distinctly than Jesus Christ has stated it already. Not
a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Father. Not one of them is
forgotten by him; and we are of more value than many sparrows; yea, even
the hairs of our head are all numbered. Not till belief in these
declarations, in their most literal sense, becomes the calm and settled
habit of the soul, is life ever redeemed from drudgery and dreary
emptiness, and made full of interest, meaning, and divine significance.
Not till then do its grovelling wants, its wearing cares, its stinging
vexations, become to us ministering spirits, each one, by a silent but
certain agency, fitting us for a higher and perfect sphere.

CONVERSATION ON CONVERSATION.

"For every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account
thereof in the day of judgment."

"A very solemn sermon," said Miss B., shaking her head impressively, as
she sat down to table on Sunday noon; then giving a deep sigh, she
added, "I am afraid that if an account is to be rendered for all our
idle words, some people will have a great deal to answer for."

"Why, Cousin Anna," replied a sprightly young lady opposite, "what do
you mean by _idle words_?"

"All words that have not a strictly useful tendency, Helen," replied
Miss B.

"I don't know what is to become of me, then," answered Helen, "for I
never can think of any thing useful to say. I sit and try sometimes, but
it always stops my talking. I don't think any thing in the world is so
doleful as a set of persons sitting round, all trying to say something
useful, like a parcel of old clocks ticking at each other. I think one
might as well take the vow of en