PEARLS FROM MANY SEAS.

ACTIVITY.

True Activity Never Fails.

Oh,

No true work since the world began was ever wasted; no true life since the world began has ever failed. understand those two perverted words, "failure" and "success," and measure them by the eternal, not the earthly, standard. When after thirty obscure, toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village carpenter, one came forth to be pre-eminently the man of sorrows, to wander from city to city in homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon the shameful cross-was that a failure? Nay, my brethren, it was the death of Him who lived that we might follow His footsteps; it was the life, it was the death, of the Son of God.-F. W. Far

RAR.

Activity Immortal.

Christian life is action; not a speculation, not a debating, but a doing. One thing, and only one, in this world has eternity stamped upon it. Feelings pass; resolves and thoughts pass; opinions change. What you have

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done lasts-lasts in you. Through ages, through eternity, what you have done for Christ-that, and only that, you are.-F. W. ROBERTSON.

Readiness in Activity.

"The work of men"-and what is that? Well, we may any of us know very quickly, on the condition of being wholly ready to do it. But many of us are for the most part thinking, not of what we are to do, but of what we are to get; and the best of us are sunk into the sin of Ananias, and it is a mortal one. We want to keep back part of the price; and we continually talk of taking up our cross, as if the only harm in a cross was the weight of it as if it was only a thing to be carried, instead of to be crucified upon. They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts."-RUSKIN.

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Activity for Christ.

The question is not merely what we can feel, but what we can do, for Christ; not how many tears we can shed, but how many sins we can mortify; not what rapture we can experience, but what self-denial we can practice; not what happy frames we can enjoy, but what hɔly duties we can perform.-JOHN ANGEll James.

Grateful Activity.

He can

Man must work. That is certain as the sun. But he may work grudgingly, or he may work gratefully; he may work as a man, or he may work as a machine. not always choose his work, but he can do it in a generous temper, and with an up-looking heart. There is no

work so rude that he may not exalt it; there is no work so impassive that he may not breathe a soul into it; there is no work so dull that he may not enliven it.—HENRY GILES.

Idleness Condemned.

I am not the only one that condemns the idle; for once when I was going to give our minister a pretty long list of the sins of one of our people whom he was asking after, I began with: "He's dreadfully lazy." "That's enough," said the old gentleman; "all sorts of sins are in that one."-SPURGEON.

Diligent and Courageous Activity.

Learn these two things: Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here, and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand. Do not be in a hurry, but be diligent. Enter into the sublime pa tience of the Lord. Be charitable in view of it. God can afford to wait; why can not we, since we have Him to fall back upon? Let patience have her perfect work and bring forth her celestial fruits. Trust to God to weave your little thread into a web, though the patterns show it not yet. -GEORGE MACDONALD.

Condensed Comments.

And yet the doing is ours-not His. He inspired it; we wrought it out. He quickened, but we brought forth His the heart-beat, but ours the hand-stroke; His the influence, ours the effluence.—GEORGE C. LORIMER.

Blessed is the man who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. Know thy work, and do it;

and work at it like Hercules.

One monster there is in

the work the idle man. --CARLYLE.

Lord Jesus, I am weary in Thy work, but not of it. If I have not yet finished my course, let me go and speak for Thee once more in the field, seal Thy truth, and come home to die.-WHITEFIEld.

God's very service is wages; His ways are strewed with roses, and paved with joy that is unspeakable and full of glory, and with peace that passeth understanding. – THOMAS BROOKS.

We are not to wait to be in preparing to be. We are not to wait to do in preparing to do, but to find in being and doing preparation for higher being and doing.-HENRY GILES.

The worst days of darkness through which I have ever passed have been greatly alleviated by throwing myself with all my energy into some work relating to others. GARFIELD.

The life of man is made up of action and endurance; and life is fruitful in the ratio in which it is laid out in noble action or in påtient perseverance.—H, P. Liddon.

This world is given as a prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world is truer still of the world to come.-F. W. ROBERTSON.

A man's labors must pass like the sunrises and sunsets of the world. The next thing, not the last, must be his care.--GEORGE MACDONALD.

You never will be saved by works; but let us tell you

most solemnly that you never will be saved without works. T. L. CUYLER.

Nothing is denied to well-directed labor; nothing is ever to be attained without it.-SIR JOSHUA Reynolds. God does not give excellence to men but as the reward of labor.-SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.

Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties.-C. N. BOVEE.

AFFABILITY.

Affability at Home.

Audubon, the great ornithologist, with gun and pencil, went through the forests of America to bring down and to sketch the beautiful birds, and after years of toil and exposure completed his manuscript, and put it in a trunk in Philadelphia for a few days of recreation and rest, and came back and found that the rats had utterly destroyed the manuscript; but without any discomposure and without any fret or bad temper, he again picked up his gun and pencil, and visited again all the great forests of America, and reproduced his immortal work. And yet there are people with the ten-thousandth part of that loss who are utterly unreconcilable, who at the loss of a pencil or an article of raiment will blow as long and sharp as a northeast storm.

Now, that man who is affable in public and who is irritable in private is making a fraudulent over-issue of stock, and he is as bad as a bank that might have four or five hundred thousand dollars of bills in circulation