FASHION.

Idolatry.

Men are as much the idolators of fashion as women, but they sacrifice on a different part of the altar. With men the fashion goes to cigars, club-rooms, yachting parties and wine suppers. In the United States the men chew up and smoke $100,000,000 worth of tobacco every year. That is their fashion. In London, not long ago, a man died who started in life with $750,000; but he ate it all up in gluttonies, sending his agents to all parts of the earth for some rare delicacy for the palate--some. times one plate of food costing him $300 or $490. He ate up his whole fortune, and had only one guinea left. With that he bought a woodcock, and had it dressed in the very best style. Then he ate it, and after allowing two hours for digestion he walked out on Westminster bridge and threw himself into the Thames-doing on a large scale what you and I have often seen done on a small scale.

But men do not abstain from millinery and elaboration of skirt through any superiority of simplicity. It is only because such appendages would be a blockade to business. What would sashes and trains three and a half yards long do in a stock market? And yet men are the disciples of custom just as much as women. Some of them wear boots so tight that they can hardly walk in the paths of righteousness; and there are men who buy expensive suits of clothes and never pay for them, going through

the streets in great stripes of color like animated checkerboards.-TALMAGE.

Fashionable Dressing.

There are clerks in stores and banks on limited salaries who, in the vain attempt to keep the wardrobe of their families as showy as other folks' wardrobes, are dying of muffs, diamonds, camel's-hair shawls and high hats. They have nothing left except what they give to cigars and wine suppers. They die before their time, and their families expect the ministers to preach about them as though they were the victims of early piety. After a high-class funeral, with silver handles at the sides of the coffin of extraordinary brightness, it will be found that the undertaker is cheated out of his legitimate expenses. Do not send to me to preach the funeral sermon of a man who dies like that. I would blurt out the whole truth, and tell that he was strangled to death by his wife's ribThe country is dressed to death. -TALMAGE.

Fashion Versus Benevolence.

Give up this idolatry of fashion or give up Heaven. What would you do standing beside the Countess of Huntingdon, whose joy it was to build chapels for the poor; or with that Christian woman of Boston, who fed fifteen hundred children of the street at Fanueil Hall, one New Year's Day, giving out as a sort of doxology at the end of the meeting a pair of shoes to each of them; or those Dorcases of modern society who have consecrated their needles to the Lord, and who will get eterna reward for every stitch they take?-TALMAGE.

The Fashion of Nature.

When I see the apple orchards of the Spring and the pageantry of the Autumn's forests, I come to the conclusion that if Nature ever does join the Church, while she may be a Quaker in the silence of her worship, she will never be a Quaker in the style of her dress. Why the notches of a fern leaf or the stamen of a water lily? Why, when the day departs, does it let the folding doors of Heaven remain open so long, when they might close so quickly? One Summer morning I saw an army of a million spears, each one adorned with a diamond of the first water. I mean the grass with the dew on it.

When the prodigal came home his father not only put a coat on his back, but jewelry on his hand. Christ wore a beard. Paul, the bachelor apostle, not afflicted with any sentimentality, admired the arrangement of a woman's hair when he said in his epistle: "If a woman have long hair, it is a glory unto her." There will be fashion in Heaven, as on earth; but it will be a different kind of fashion. It will decide the color of the dress; and the population of that country, by a beautiful law, will wear white.-TALMAGE.

FATE.

The Strangeness of Fate.

Two shall be born the whole wide world apart,
And speak in different tongues, and have no thought
Each of the other's being, and no heed;

And these o'er unknown seas to unknown lands
Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death;
And, all unconsciously, shape every act
And bend each wandering step to this one end-
That one day, out of darkness, they shall meet
And read life's meaning in each other's eyes.

And two shall walk some narrow way of life

So nearly side by side that, should one turn
Ever so little space to right or left,

They needs must stand, acknowledged, face to face;
And yet, with wistful eyes that never meet,
With groping hands that never clasp, and lips

Calling in vain to ears that never hear,

They seek each other all their weary days.

And die unsatisfied-and that is fate!

SUSAN M. SPAULDING.

FORGIVENESS.

Asking Forgiveness.

Never be ashamed to apologize when you have done wrong in domestic affairs. Let that be a law of your household. The best thing I ever heard of my grandfather, whom I never saw, was this: Having rebuked one of his children, and having found later that he had been misinformed concerning the child's doings, he gathered all his family together in the evening of the same day, and said: "Now, I have one explanation to make,

Never be

and one thing to say. Thomas, this morning I rebuked you very unfairly. I am very sorry for it. I rebuked you in the presence of the whole family, and now I ask your forgiveness in their presence." It must have taken some courage to do that. It was right, was it not? ashamed to apologize for domestic inaccuracy. the points-what are the weak points, if I may call them so--of your companion, and then stand aloof from them. -TALMAGE.

The Forgiveness of God.

Find out

If you

If you, dear friend, feel that you are spiritually sick, the Physician has come into the world for you. are altogether undone by reason of your sin, you are the very person aimed at in the plan of salvation. I say the Lord of Love had just such as you are in His eye when He arranged the system of grace. Suppose a man of generous spirit were to resolve to forgive all those who were indebted to him; it is clear that this can only apply to those really in his debt. One person owes him £1,000 and another owes him £50. Each one has but to have his bill receipted, and the liability is wiped out. But the most generous person can not forgive the debts of those who do not owe him anything. It is out of the power of Omnipotence to forgive where there is no sin. Pardon, therefore, can not be for you who have no sin. Pardon must be for the guilty. Forgiveness must be for the sinful. It were absurd to talk of forgiving those who do not need forgiveness-pardoning those who have never offended. SPURGEON.