XLVIII.

WHAT treasure can equal time?

It is the seed of eternity;

yet we suffer ourselves to go on, year after year, hardly using it at all in God's service, or thinking it enough to give Him at most a tithe or a seventh of it, while we strenuously and heartily sow to the flesh, that from the flesh we may reap corruption. We try how little we can safely give to religion, instead of having the grace to give abundantly.-J. H. NEWMAN.

XLIX.

SIN has many tools, but a lie is

the handle which fits them all.

-OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

L.

HE that does evil that good may

come pays a toll to the devil

to let him into heaven.-O. W. HOLMES.

LI.

GET work, get work;

Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get. E. B. BROWNING.

LII.

EXCELLENCE is never granted

to man but as the reward of labour. It argues, indeed, no small strength of mind to persevere in habits of industry without the pleasure of perceiving those advances, which, like the hand of a clock,

whilst they make hourly approaches to their point, yet proceed so slowly as to escape observation. SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.

LIII.

Entellect.

INTELLECT, no doubt, is attractive, but the attraction is wanting both in power and in universality. It is not a universal attraction, since to do justice to intellect there must be mind enough to take stock of what it is, and of what it achieves ; and most of us, you and I, make no pretension to be intellectual in this sense. And there are large regions of our nature, and those often the most interesting, which it does not emotely touch. How often do we

see intellect triumphantly silencing adverse argument, yet quite unable to produce conviction; the truth being that although no answer seems to be forthcoming, something whispers that there is an answer if it could only at the moment be produced. Such a whisper proceeds from a district of the soul for which mere intellect has made, and can make, no provision whatever. This district is spirit, just as real a department of the soul's life as is that in which intellect lives and works,-just as real but a far higher one. There were simple Christians who had no chance in conversation with a master of profane repartee like Voltaire; but then his brilliant sarcasms left them where they were; an ostenta

tiously godless logic does not even touch that region of spiritual instinct in which, as in a native atmosphere, faith and love flourish and grow. The truth is that intellect often forfeits its legitimate power through being divorced from goodness. There is no necessary connection between goodness and the very highest intellectual gifts. Balaam is an instance of lofty prophetic insight joined to a fatal obliquity or weakness of moral character;-he died fighting against the enemies of the truth which he had defended and proclaimed. Bacon, the father of inductive philosophy, is a sample of the highest scientific intellect; and yet, for the credit of intellect, we almost wish that he could have been less wise than he