where the great mountains take their rise, you will find many a consecrated temple, and many an altar of Love. The Love that has planned the world; the Love that moulded its flowers of varied hue; that Love that clothed the birds in beautiful plumage, and gave them. the voice of song; the Love that shaped the snow-clad mountains, and made a pathway through the valleys for the rivers to flow; the Love that planned the eternal arch of God's blue Heaven above us, bathing everything in the sweet light of the sun; the Love that blesses our homes, and protects us from "the pestilence that walketh in darkness, and the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday;" and above all, the Love that has redeemed us, and made us heirs of the Kingdom,-such Love is our teacher every day, and declares to us that the grandest, noblest Religion, the purest Creed, the loftiest faith, is that which teaches a man to "love God with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself." "This is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices."

The Value of Frequent Services.

ST. JOHN XII. 36.

"While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the Children of Light. These things spake Jesus and departed."

If the text had said, "While ye have darkness, believe in the darkness," I should not have wondered at any man's unbelief. And there is more "darkness" in much of our popular theology than ever was seen in a winter's most gloomy sky. But the mystery is this: that it is the Light that, in the Bible, men are asked to believe in, and yet they believe in it not, though it be the Light! But perhaps it may be that we too often represent the Light as if it was darkness, and therefore men will not believe in the message that we bring. At any

rate the text tells us to believe in the Light while we have it with us; to realize its presence, and to appreciate its value, and to walk as the "Children of the Light." There never was a truer saying than that familiar one, that we don't know the value of a thing till we lose it. Take health, for instance. What tricks we play with health. What severe strains we often place upon it. What risks we run. How badly we often treat it. And so long as health is ours, how little thankfulness we have for it. We take health almost as a "matter of course.” We expect it to be ours day by day, just as we expect the sun to rise, or the sun to set. I wonder how many of us have this week, in our morning and evening prayers, thanked God for our health. But when once health breaks down, and our frail bodies begin to feel their weakness, then how we long for the blessing of strength, and good health; and people turn round and they say, “I never knew till I lost it what a priceless blessing health was!" Or eye-sight, for instance,-do we ever thank God for that? If we lost our

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sight we should then begin to know the real value of the thing we had lost.

But yet, surely, this is not as it ought to be? Not to be really thankful for mercies till we have experienced what it is to be without them; not to value them till they have left us, is bad; not to believe that Light is Light, till that Light has left us, and the darkness has taken its place. "While ye have light," says the text, "believe in the light, that ye may be the Children of Light." You see, it all turns upon this word "believe." That is where the fault lies. They don't believe. They don't believe in the Light, or that it is the Light, though the Light is with them. It was the sin of the Jews-the elect people-the people who had every Church privilege-they would not believe in Him who had come amongst them as the Light of the world. Though Christ pleaded with them, though He said to them, "While ye have Me with you, believe in Me;" "While ye have Light, believe in the Light," they would not. They were very strict religionists; they made broad their phylacteries and

enlarged the borders of their garments; they made long prayers; they paid their tithes of mint, and anise, and cummin; but they did not value the Light. And just for this reasonbecause they did not really believe in it. And we Gentiles of to-day, as we read in our Bible the story of the Life on earth of Him who was the Light, scowl at those Jews of eighteen centuries ago; and we say, "If we had lived in the days when Christ was here upon. earth, we should have believed in Him. There is no hand now that would have lifted a hammer to nail Him to the Cross; no tongue now that would have cursed Him, or refused to believe in Him as the Light of the world." Ah! this is vain boasting. This is false assertion. The world is still what it was then. Men find a Calvary now, and they make a Cross for Him still; they plait their crown of thorns to place upon His Head still; and there is the multitude still that refuses the Light, just because it does not believe in it as the Light. And the words can be applied to us to-day, as truly as they were addressed to the