fleeting days of childhood give shape to manhood and its destinies, so the years of time shape the eternal future of the soul. How insignificant seem the little grains of sand! Yet you see them heaped up and framed to become the mould in which the molten iron is poured.. So with the grains of time. Whether you design it or not, you are turning them into the mould in which liquid thought, feeling and purpose crystallize, till they are like the iron or the granite. A wasted, squandered day is not simply so much reduction of spiritual existence and activity. It is a flaw in the mould. Its imprint on the character is imperfection and deformity. Years of sin are not simply so much offset against the balance of a reformed life. They are such a portion of the mould itself broken up.

Bend the twig and you incline the tree. One moment's pressure on the sapling may do more to injure it or shape it, than tempests in after years. No arithmetic can compute the results that must flow from an error now. Each of these moments may be the pivot on which a world to come is poised. Thousands in the agonies of despair have been able to look back to some critical juncture, some memorable moment, on the issue of which the scope of after years depended. There, just at that point, a single moment seems like the turning point of destiny. It might have opened the door to hope and heaven. It might have been made the gateway to eternal blessedness. It might have been the first round of a Jacob's ladder. It might have marked the point where, turning on his track, the penitent sinner should have been greeted by that gratulation of angels over the new-born soul— "behold he prayeth."

Is such a moment precious? Who would run the risk

of flinging it away like chaff, of dissolving such a jewel in the wine cup, or leaving it to swell the rubbish of a wasted life? Such a moment comes to all. It marks the crisis of the soul's destiny. To you it may have come to-day, and it may never come again. Yet every moment that leads to it, or draws it on, is also precious. Each day is preparing you for it, to use it or abuse it. These tickings of the clock, these beatings of the pulse, these noiseless swingings of the pendulum of time, hasten the striking of the hour of doom. The impression of every scene, of every lesson, of every folly is pushing you on to some decision—whether you will serve God or not, whether you will consecrate your life to its true end or not. On, on rolls the tide of hours, days and years, swifter and stronger in current, setting more resistless toward the cataract. Moment flows into moment, melts into the mass and is lost to view, but every drop swells the flood that bears you on-that presses you to the final issue.

And then think of wasted time-for all is wasted, so long as the great end of life is overlooked. What are feasts and fortunes and honors, if God is not glorified? What is all industry, if you give not diligence to make your calling and election sure? What is all business, if you are never busy for God, never busy to lay up treasure in heaven? The sands of the desert are barren, but what is their curse to that of the time-grains of a life given over to vanity, frivolity and sin? Over this Sahara-waste sweep the burning blasts of remorse. Over it no fragrance breathes, within it no flowers bloom. Only the life that is devoted to God, that breathes in prayer and exults in praises, that garners the hours and coins them all with the stamp of duty, with the image

and superscription of their great proprietor-only such a life is worthy the name. Any other is but a living death. Any other is but the slow steady deliberate murder of time-the sacrifice of probation and privilege on the altar of mammon or lust.

How long then before you will begin truly to live? An uncertain future makes a day, an hour, too long to wait. And even if the future was certain, it would be madness to live any part of it in a course of deeds that we shall want undone. Undone! It cannot be. Tears cannot wash the past out. It is cut in the rock forever. There stands the soul's changeless image. You cannot re-form, or new model, or correct it. Suppose it is a Juggernaut, a Mammon, a Gallileo, a Simon Magus! Will it do to wait till it becomes such before you begin to mould and shape your years to save them from such perversion? You will find it a hard, an almost hopeless task,

"To improve the remnant of your wasted span,
And having lived a trifler, die a man.”

""Tis well if looked for at so late a day,

In the last scene of such a senseless play,
True wisdom will attend your feeble call,
And grace your actions, ere the curtain fall.
Souls that have long despised their heavenly birth,
Their wishes all impregnated with earth—

For three-score years employed with ceaseless care
In catching smoke and feeding upon air-
Conversant only with the ways of men,

Rarely redeem the short remaining ten.”

If they do, what remains is only like scattered freight picked from a wreck, the poor sad memorials of life's great disaster, full of tears and vain regrets. Will you take them as your sum of life?

A

XLI.

THE PSALM OF LIFE.

• Making melody in your heart to the Lord."-EPH. v. 19.

SHORT time since it was my privilege to hear

some hundreds of children sing. With life and spirit they sang the "Forward, march !" and in mellower tone and with sweeter pathos, "There's a light in the window for thee."

It was, indeed, a privilege to hear them. There was a charm in that multitude of young voices harmonizing together. I was called upon to address them, and I told them, as the most appropriate thing that came to my mind, that I wished they would each make their life a song of praise, so that their words, and deeds, and thoughts, and plans should harmonize together, and that would make the true Psalm of Life.

The Psalm of Life! or life a psalm of praise to God, rendering to Him in grateful devotion the true harmony of soul, of all its faculties, and thoughts, and acts, through all the years of probation! Is not this the standard, the Divine standard, at which all should aim? Does it not express that which, if realized, would answer for us the true end of our being? Does it not answer to the highest and noblest ideal which the soul can cherish? And what is sin, in all its forms, in all its variety of shapes, but just the discord which disturbs the harmony; some

times in a single note; sometimes in whole stanzas; sometimes in the whole song? It puts others out. It jars and grates, as it were, on the ear. It makes all that hear it uncomfortable. It destroys all harmony. It deals with the music of a holy life, or of a pure society, as the earthquake does with a fair landscape, covering it with confusion and rubbish!

To secure the true divine harmony in the heart, the life must be consistent with itself, the thoughts with the words, the words with the deeds, and all of them with one another, and with the law and will of God. Nothing short of this will ensure a perfect and harmonious life.

So to social order and happiness it is essential that the views and feelings of men should accord. Not that they should be precisely alike in faculty, or education, or apprehensions of things. They may differ here as the different parts vary in music, and yet there shall be, if only each, true to the keynote of Christian love, executes his part, a higher melody.

But to secure this result, each individual note must be correct. What if it be a little thing. A slight variation produces discord. And hence it is that to the general order, and harmony, and happiness we must train each thought and utterance of the individual soul.

The heart of man may be compared to an organ, its keys swept by the fingers of each individual will. Some with rude hands, finding it disordered and untuned, force it to send forth harsh and grating tones. Some pour forth from it the anthems of praise, and some the peals of holiday music, while others make it breathe the thunder-gusts of passion, or roll to the music of the devil's march.

Where the thoughts and words do not accord, you have