There's Heaven in It.

We turn our sad, reluctant gaze
Upon the path of duty;

Its barren, uninviting ways

Are void of bloom and beauty.

Yet in that road, though dark and cold
It seems as we begin it,
As we press on-lo! we behold

There's Heaven in it.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX.

Condensed Comments.

Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day lay this precept well to heart: "Do the duty which lieth nearest to thee," which thou knowest to be a duty. Thy second duty will already have become clearer. THOMAS CARLYLE.

Go to your duty, every man, and trust yourself to Christ; for He will give you all supply just as fast as you need it. You will have just as much power as you believe you can have. Be a Christian; throw yourself upon God's work; and get the ability you want in it.—HORACE BUSHNell.

Duty is duty; conscience is conscience; right is right, and wrong is wrong-whatever sized type they may be printed in. "Large" and "Small" are not words for the vocabulary of conscience.-ALEXANDER MACLAREN.

When any duty is to be done, it is fortunate for you if you feel like doing it; but, if you do not feel like it, that is no reason for not doing it.-W. GLADDEN.

No simplest duty is forgot,

Life has no dim and lonely spot

That doth not in her sunshine share.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

Happiness is not the end of duty; it is a constituent of it. It is in it and of it; not an equivalent, but an element.-HENRY GILES.

The doing of things from duty is but a stage on the road to the kingdom of truth and love.-George MacDONALD.

There is no evil which we can not face or fly from but the consciousness of duty disregarded.- DANIEL WEB

STER.

Ability involves responsibility. Power to its last particle is duty.-ALEXANDER MACLAREN.

The consciousness of duty performed gives us music at midnight.-George Herbert.

Beloved, thou doest a faithful work in whatsoever thou doest.-ST. JOHN.

EARNESTNESS.

Earnestness in Speech.

The main business is to have plenty of heart. I have noticed that speakers produce an effect upon their audiences rather in proportion to their hearts than their heads. I was present at a meeting where a truly solid and instructive speaker succeeded in mesmerizing us all, so that in another half minute we should all have been asleep. His talk was as good as gold, and as heavy. He was followed by a gentleman who was "all there," what there was of him. He was so energetic that he broke a chair, and made us all draw in our feet, for fear he should come down upon our corns. How the folk woke up! The galleries cheered him to the echo. I do not know

what it was all about, and did not know at the time; but it was very wonderful. An express at sixty miles an hour

He swept past us like-well,

is nothing to that orator. like nothing at all. He meant it, and we felt that he deserved to be cheered for such zealous intentions.

He

was all ablaze, and we were willing for a season to rejoice in his light. SPURGEON.

Earnestness in Saving Life.

I once heard of a vessel that was wrecked, and there were not life-boats enough to take all that were on the vessel, and some who were left there to perish in the water went swimming around the life-boats. One poor fellow swam up to a boat and seized it with his left hand. A man in the boat drew his sword and cut off the hand.

The man was terribly in earnest to save his life, and he swam up a second time and reached out his right hand, and they cut off his right hand. He did not give up. He was terribly in earnest to save his life. Everything else was forgotten, and he swam up again and seized hold of the boat with his teeth. This touched those men's hearts; they had compassion, and they took him out of the jaws of death, out of a watery grave, and he was saved because he was in earnest. He was saved because he sought with all his strength and all his mind. And so, my friends, when you and I want salvation above everything else, then we will get it, and not before. — MOODY.

Earnestness in Religion.

A certain degree of publicity in a spiritual quickening of the Church is inevitable. It is but natural. Other great awakenings work in the same way. We do not denounce the ardor of a political campaign as the hysteria of sick folk. We do not call the rush to the gold mines of California and the Black Hills cant. Why, then, judge by a different law the great awakenings of men to the relations of eternity? The Black Hills, with all their golden treasures, will one day burn to cinders in volcanic fire. The souls of the men now crowding there will then be still living somewhere, undying as God is. Where? That is the question the Church tries to answer in a great revival. On one occasion Edmund Burke came upon the hustings to contest a seat in Parliament before an excited assembly. The people had come together with preparations for bonfires and illuminations and proces

sions moving to the sound of drum and fife. When he had just mounted the platform the news came that his opponent, who was to have met him there that morning, had been found dead in his bed. Both Burke and his hearers were so overwhelmed by that momentary opening of the eternal world to their dim vision that he could not speak and they were in no mood to hear. He only lifted his voice for one solemn moment, and exclaimed: "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" Was that cant? Yet a revival of religion is no other than just that awakening to the reality of eternal things and a permanent setting of the current of popular thought in that channel.--AUSTIN PHELPS.

Earnestness a Thunderbolt.

It is a principle of war that when you can use the thunderbolt you must prefer it to the cannon. Earnestness is the thunderbolt.-NAPOLEON.

EDUCATION.

The Diffusion of Education.

Education, to accomplish the ends of good government, should be universally diffused. Open the doors of the school-house to all the children of the land. Let no man have the excuse of poverty for not educating his own offspring. Place the means of education within his reach, and if they remain in ignorance, be it his own reproach. If one object of the expenditure of revenue be protection