how sharply we may be cut so that we may be made fil

brilliants to adorn His Crown.-SPURGEON.

If Christ Were Here Now.

He

What would Christ do were He to live and act in this city?" The question is fair, because it simply asks what our whole world most needs. The Man of Nazareth would make a wonderful revolution in our world if He should persuade us all to live up to our knowledge. If the mind believes in temperance, in justice, in benevolence, in industry, in perfect honor, in physical and moral beauty, then all that remains is to make each day overflow with the obedience of these rich truths. Christ would be a divine friend could He do away with the distance between human philosophy and human life. need not check the understanding. He need only help the heart to catch up. The matchless beauty of Jesus lay not chiefly in the ethics which was stored in His mind—an ethics so perfect, so universal, so Divine—but it lay also in the fact that His philosophy did not outrun His soul. His oratory was the photograph of His life. His voice was like the murmur of the sea, which is not nearly so great as the sea itself. His words were fewHis conduct vast. We reverse the picture and follow our gigantic philosophy with a microscopic life. And yet the fact that we excel the Negroes and the Indians proves that when the mind climbs to a height the heart also creeps up out of the valley. In the Son of God the intellect and the soul were companions. They were inseparable. The wreaths for the forehead of Jesus were

wreaths for the heart.

Great men like Emerson and

Whittier and Gladstone are persons in whom mind and heart are both one. In Jesus the thought could not outrun the love.-SWING.

Christ and the Cross.

Christ longed for the cross, because He looked for it as the goal of all His exertions. He could never say, on His throne, It is finished"; but on His cross He did cry it. He preferred the suffering of Calvary to the honors of the multitude who crowded round about Him; for, preach as He might, and bless them as He might, and heal them as He might, still was His work undone. He was straitened; He had a baptism to be baptized with, and how was He straitened till it was accomplished? 'But," He said, "now I pant for my cross, for it is the topstone of my labor. I long for my sufferings, because they shall be the completion of my great work of grace." It is the end that bringeth the honor; it is the victory that crowneth the warrior, rather than the battle. And so Christ longed for this, His death, that He might see the completion of His labor.-SPURGEON.

Our Savior's Earthly Home.

It draws toward sunset as I pause here at the edge of a rustling grove of olive-trees in the center of the green, quiet, solemn valley from which Nazareth and its chief hill look on Esdraelon, Tabor, Carmel, the Mediterranean and Great Hermon. In all Palestine there is, it is said, no more rich and extensive prospect then that I

have just named, seen from the hill on the north of Nazareth, and certainly the other, views I have myself had are each inferior to that. During the youth and early manhood of the life that has changed the course of the ages, He, who was chief among ten thousand, must have often looked here upon the wide, far-flashing sea, beyond which, in Gentile nations, His kingdom was to have, during eighteen centuries, its chief seats; and upon snowy, gigantic Hermon, itself not to be as enduring as that kingdom. I am impatient when I hear this little valley, a mile long and half a mile wide, the town on its northwestern side, spoken of as secluded. It is secluded only as an eagle's nest is, at the summit of far-looking mountains. It stands on the heights of the ranges extending from Mount Tabor to near the sea, on the north side of the great Plain of Esdraelon. If a swallow's nest beneath the eaves of a palace is secluded, then is Nazareth so; for it is built at the edge of the colossal roof of the palace of Palestine. It may be secluded from the population, but not from the natural scenery, and especially not from the historic sites of the oldest history of the Holy Land. This is a shadow valley at the summit and on the edge of a range of mountains, and Nazareth is thus a mountain city.-JOSEPH Cook.

Christ of the People.

He was born in a common house of entertainment, where all might come to Him, and He died with His arms extended as a pledge that He continued to receive all who came to Him. He never spoke of men as the