had taken off his hand, and let them stray back what would they not have lost! But he stayed them up, even against themselves. Many a time their foot had well-nigh slipped, but He in his mercy, held them up; now, even in this life, they know all He did was done well. It was good for them to suffer, — they shall reign; to bear the cross, they shall wear the crown; and not that their will but His was done in them.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.

PALM Sunday is the anniversary-day of a

grand victory over life, as Easter Sunday is of a like victory over death. . . . And so it is that this day is sacred to us as the day on which the Saviour turned of his own accord to death, entered on the last and heaviest pain, bowed his head to the thorns and his neck to the cross, gave his cheek to the smiter, his soul to the agony, and his life to the world.

... Over there is the great city and temple, its roofs flashing like burnished gold in the summer sunlight, but full of men that hate him and are determined to kill him whenever again he shall enter its gates. There behind him is the house of the sisters where he is so welcomed and honored and loved. Away over to the North is dear

old Galilee, where he wandered as a boy and worked as a man. And why should he not turn the head of his yearling round, go back to Bethany, rest and repair his wasted strength, and then go to his old home and be quiet forevermore?

Ah, friends, when we know why, we know one of the most inestimable secrets that ever found its way into human souls; for then we know how one little word of four letters, repeated in the quiet of the soul, can outweigh all the pleading of the nature for exemption from pain, all the longings of the heart for the world's best blessings, all the shrinking of the soul itself from the horrors of great darkness, and can carry us through Gethsemane and up Calvary and roll the great stone away from the sepulchre and lift us through the parting cloud; and that small whispered word is Duty, and its twin sister is Love.

And I know of nothing more fruitful of instruction than to imagine for a moment that he should have yielded to the feeling that so struggled with Duty as, soon after, to compel him to cry, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me," and so turn back to Bethany and Galilee and the old quiet life again. What, then, must have been the result? Let me remember it whenever nature grapples with duty and tries to force her back to

ease and quiet on my Palm Sunday.. Had it

been possible that the whisper of that one little word should not be more than all beside to the Messiah, there would have been no Messiah and no Saviour. The most glorious things in this world's history and life would have been a dead blank. The infinite, the divine patience, the words that have sunk into the world's heart, the things that have renewed the world's life, had all gone back with that retreating figure, and no such light as rests there now, had rested on our graves, and no shining ones sat there to tell us they are empty of all but the graveclothes. The tenant

has risen and gone to the old home again (to our Galilee). Thank God, it could not be so! The sun shining overhead that Palm Sunday had sooner turned back to his rising than Jesus had gone back to Bethany.

But the lesson touches the heart as directly, stands before us as imperiously, is as inevitable, as if it could have been; and it is this: suppose I turn back when Duty whispers, Go right on; suppose sorrow and trial and pain, or the prospect of it, masters me, what then? Then there is no Palm Sunday in my calendar; no shout for me of "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!" In turning back, in shrinking back, in

failing to face all I fear when that little word is whispered in my soul, I leave that part of my life which may be the very condition of immortality a dead blank.

THE

ROBERT COLLYER.

HE world's supreme act of self-sacrifice was serene and calm in the moment of its performance; anguished and awful in the moments of its preparation. It was always in the intensity of prayer that our Lord saw what the Father willed him to do: and the natural weakness which trembled and shrank was poured into the bosom of the communing Comforter and replaced by his strength, so that the real trial was over before the outward occasion came; and then no defeat was possible, for every element of infirmity had been brought to the Light in which is no darkness, and before him had passed away. And thus forever prayer remains the great duty of our nature, whether in the times in which sadly and humbly we resort to it as our refuge from the stupor or the wilfulness of selfishness and sin, or in the times in which we feel invited to communion, with the rapture and delight of clear vision offered to us if we will obey the call, and not shrink from the glorifying effort to meet our God.

JOHN HAMILTON THOM.

You may teach your child his prayers, and he

shall say them with bended knee and reverent lips, and you shall explain to him how God hears and answers prayers, and he shall heed your counsels, and go to church and join decorously in the service, and be shocked and pained at irreverence in others, and all the while have hardly yet known what prayer is, until in some profound trial, under some bitter bereavement, in some humiliating or threatening exposure, in some awakening throe of conscience, some shock of the intellect or the will, the theorizer and second-hand saint finds himself overboard and called to swim for his life,

no bladders under him, no fenced-in swimmingbath around him, no life-boat near, nothing left but the distant shore and his muscles, courage and effort to reach it! Then it is, when the soul cries out for the living God, longs and faints for his presence, and in its fierce struggle for life strikes out with its spiritual limbs to reach its shore, that faith is born; that God's spirit comes under the soul, like the bounding, elastic sea beneath the trusting swimmer; that prayer becomes its own interpreter, God his own witness, and the soul its own teacher and way.

Experience is the inward light, and it will satisfy