"to loiter and to spend it as we will." But, dear friends, what is it you most need? Let me ask a direct question: What is your deepest need? You have grown somewhat cold. You have lost something of your first love. You are not satisfied. You do not mean always to be as you are. The world is slowly wearing out your heart. Some of you are making a business of pleasure. These are the engagements you meet. These are the hours your thoughts are on. You perform the duties of other hours that you may get to these. Others, again, are engrossed in business. It fills your thought. It interests, it absorbs you. For six days, at least, you have time and care for little else. All of you together are like miners who work under ground. Monday morning you hurry to the pits: one to this shaft, another to that. They are numberless as your occupations: one is the store, another the office, another the mill, another household duties, another teaching, another lessons, another pleasure. It makes no difference which. All lead into the mine where each finds his place and begins to work away by himself. Now it is Sunday morning. Up you have all come. One day you are to have in the sunlight. What will you do with it? Carry on the work of the mine? Talk of it? Think of it? Keep the implements and signs of it about you? The life in the mine, the secular life, is necessary. Yes, we live by it. God has placed us here. But is this what we are made for? Is this your true self? Or, is the real man, the real woman, covered up and hidden by this?

Now you can come forth. Do you not care to? Would you really live that life as uninterruptedly as possible? No, beloved, you would not. For what would it profit! Then here is the multitude of those also who are not Christians. Sunday, as you and I know it, is nothing to them. They do not go to church, and do go to the theater. They are glad of a day of rest or amusement, but what is the Lord's Day to them? You cannot legislate them into the Kingdom. By law, you may close the dram shops and the theaters; you may put a stop to ball games; you may secure a general suspension of secular labor. Which is all desirable and important. The community has everthing at stake in securing, even by law, its day of rest, and none need it more than the classes who are most inclined to overthrow it. But this is not the problem before us in the church. This is wholly secondary and superficial. Valuable as such a Sunday is, I question greatly whether it can anywhere be long maintained for its own sake. The forces of evil are far too powerful to be withstood on purely prudential and secular grounds. In any case, as Christians, we have a far deeper interest at stake. This is the Lord's Day. Here is its worth. How can I so use it as to get the blessing it brings for myself, and win others to discern its worth, and come to share its blessings with me? Here is the great truth. We cannot drive the world to God, nor compel them to keep the Sabbath holy. But we can win them. We can preach

the Gospel, and live the Gospel. We can show the truth and the beauty of holiness, and of those agencies, the Bible, the Sabbath and the church, by which holiness is brought to pass and kept alive in the hearts of men. When the world sees what religion really is, then the world will honor the instruments of religion. When the world honors Christians, it will honor the Christian Sabbath. Here, then, is the very core and heart of the whole matter. God has given us Sunday that He might bring us to Himself and keep us near Himself. Then He gives it to us that with it we may reach the world, and win it also to Him.

The question how I, as a Christian, may use the Sabbath-what I may do, and what I may not-is not difficult. Whatever interferes with this purpose and plan of God's, of course I am to shun. Whatever is in the line of it, whatever promotes it, eagerly I adopt. This as a rule for myself. When called to counsel others, this serves as well. Here is the principle; every Christian has but to apply it.

Am I so tired Sunday morning that I cannot worship God? Need I be so tired? A wise man has said a child's education begins a hundred years before he is born. Sunday fatigue may begin early in the week; suppose early in the week you begin to guard against it. Is there any reason why, in a Christian household, so many things should be put off till Saturday? Would these mothers be so weary, would the families find it so

hard to get to church in time on Sunday morning, if less extra work were planned for Saturday, and a little forethought given to securing less pressure and haste on Sunday? The trades unions are securing shorter hours of labor; the Saturday half-holiday is a coming blessing with an advancing civilization. These are so many facilities given to the weary to prepare the body that it do not rob the soul of the Sabbath blessing.

Then when the day dawns, how shall we receive it? With the Sunday newspaper? Recall what has been said of our purpose. God's glad day! The store is shut. The office books are in the safe. The noisy clatter of the factory has stopped. The great hall of the Exchange is given up to silence. A mouse nibbles merrily in the pit, and the caller's index idly points at nothing. The weary week has ended. For to-day, at least, I am free. Greed, passion, strife, ambition, falsehood, cunning, temptation, toil, you are shut out. I have a soul. God has drawn near. He has much to say; and I much need to hear. Now, shall I take up the morning paper? Not for long; not to read it; only to glance over it? To see the news that will make me impatient for to-morrow that I may turn it to account? To read the bit of gossip or of scandal, that shall occupy my thought, as I look over at my neighbor in church? To catch up all the odds and ends of the week, from which I have but just escaped, that they may fill my mind which but just now hungered for something

is not

different? To be startled to hear the church bells ring,
and find that I have read so long?" "The paper
so bad," you say, dear friend. No; there is much good
in it. But you are a Christian. Consider the stand-
point we have taken. You would not have it lowered.
You would not give up your hope of getting rich spir-
itual blessing. You would not have the Lord's Day
mean less than this. Then there is your son; your wife;
your daughter, perhaps; and your neighbor. You
surely would not have your example a stumbling-block
to them. You would not do all that is in your power
to patronize and support, nay to create, an agency, which,
in a thousand houses, is doing just this-utterly secular-
izing the Sabbath; an agency which, but for the patron-
age of Christians could not live. If this is what it
means, surely you would not.

But then a little further. How shall we go to church? With laggard steps, a quarter, a half-hour late? Is it a small matter? Have we not started out to use this day for God? Is this being glad as we go into the courts of the Lord? This is God's hour; this His house; His promise. Shall we grudge this service?

Says the quaint Geo. Herbert:

"O, be drest.

Stay not for the other pin; why, thou hast lost
A joy for it worth worlds. Thus hell doth jest

Away thy blessings, and extremely flout thee,
Thy clothes being fast, but thy soul loose about thee.

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