your spirit in touch with the supreme test of the life of Christ.

Reverence your conscience! There is need, for the conscience is the Judge within us, who gives decisions, proclaiming duty, that is, what is due from us. It is conscience which gives us the sense of "ought," which tells us that we "owe" the ordering of our conduct to a higher Power. How prone we are to give much and constant thought to our own rights and to the duties of others towards us. Let us rather try to look at the rights of others and our duties to them.

Do not let your conscience sleep, do not lull it to sleep, do not try and tamper with it by letting inclination plead before it with subtlety.

Let us keep our conscience instructed and then it will be alert and keen, and there will be no fear of wrong decisions, which let the greyness creep over the pages of life; truth will be ours-truth in every decision, in every deed.

In the day when we shall see, as St. John saw, "The dead small and great standing before God," whom will God call great? Those whom renown has crowned with laurels, those who toiled for and achieved fame as Soldiers, Statesmen, Scholars? Nay, surely those who have spent their lives in silent, unwearying service and love of their fellowmen, in soothing suffering, in redressing wrong.

"While Valor's haughty champions wait
Till all their scars are shown,

Love walks unchallenged through the gate
To sit beside the Throne."

If we would walk unchallenged by, we must have love and pity; love for others, pity for the weak,

the suffering, the wronged; yes, and for those who do wrong. In such there will be a deep and abiding joy. Give pity to others, give none to yourselves; for self-pity increases the sum of human misery, and unnerves the arm of service.

"Slander not!" Are your sympathies keen? Have you a sense of generosity? If so, you cannot speak ill of others, you cannot listen when ill is spoken. It is a fine loyalty which forbids us to say one word of the absent which we dare not say in their presence.

"The white flower of a blameless life." Purity. The beginnings of life are on the high ground of innocence. Round us lie the dark gulfs. Let those who stand on the high ground of innocence determine, passionately, to stand there unstained. Let those, who in ignorance or with deliberation fell or plunged into the dark gulfs, climb gallantly back though bruised and stained, tremulously eager to stand again, and henceforth, and for ever, in the sunlight of purity.

When you have made Truth, Pity, Generosity, and Purity your own priceless possessions, you will find that Happiness has come to you. It will shine out of your eyes and in your deeds. You will find that you love life, and that you will make others love it by your radiant joyousness. It will not be merely the joy of living, though that is good; it will be the deeper joy of right done, of sympathy given, of purity achieved.

Have you gone out, are you going out into the world with nothing before your eyes to win wealth, comfort, renown? be from us, but you are not of us.

but the hope Then you may Let the spirit

you take away from this School be one which breathes a deep desire for a life of devotion to others, a life of dedication to God.

Which of you would bring joy into your life, to keep and to give, to give utterly whilst keeping it wholly? Let him glow with admiration; let him burn with indignation; let him trust unquestioningly; let him sympathize with all his soul; let him welcome the wind and the rain, the storm of struggle, yes, and the bruises of defeat; let him cling passionately to purity, praying that, when Life's quest is over, he may be counted ever more and more worthy to wear the white flower of a stainless life.

Go, in all gladness, to dedicate your life to Him, with the unswerving intention of offering yourself, with every fibre of your being, as you say in your heart, kneeling before him :

"Just as I am, young, strong, and free,
To be the best that I can be,

For truth, and righteousness, and Thee,
Lord of my life, I come.”

VI

THE CLAIMING OF MANHOOD

(October 28th, 1906.)

"For whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have."-Luke viii. 18.

How impressive, how full of meaning, must the message have been to the listeners, as the words fell from Christ's lips that spring day in Galilee.

As they stand, realizing the deep truth of the message, some perhaps with an uneasy sense of injustice which comes when prosperity and misery, success and failure, stand side by side-some accepting the obvious inequalities of life with forlorn resignation; others with bitterness and an impatient hope that everything should one day be adjusted-there must have been through all their thoughts the clear law that the happy do tend to become happier, the good better, the rich richer, the bad worse, the fools more foolish, the poor poorer.

Nearly 1900 years have passed. But to-day, as we read, the truth leaps to our eyes, and we see the law working in countless directions. In business, men stream to him who is full of work, begging him to work, to buy, to sell for them. The man, whom all men praise, is the man whom all are praising. Friends, riches, popularity, fly to those who have them in abundance, whilst the poor

strive with grinding poverty, the friendless lose the friends they had.

Here in your School life you see how privilege tends to attract other privilege. The more a boy knows, the more sources of learning open to him on every side. To the popular boy friends come flocking to claim some fragment of kindness at his hands. To the boy who wants to help, there start at his feet endless opportunities of helping; whilst the selfish, who will not help, lose even the power to help. Here, and elsewhere, we see that goodness and badness have this same principle of accumulation.

We know that life has but two directions. We are moving forward or we are drifting back. We are doing good, or we are doing harm. There is no standing still.

If we delude ourselves into thinking that a day or even an hour of our life can mean neither loss nor gain, we have but to look at anything which has life, and instantly we see the ebb and flow, the growth and decay, the gain and loss, and there must come, with an illuminating flash, the knowledge that, if the direction of our lives is not set towards righteousness, we must be marching towards darkness; that, if we are not doing good in this world, we are doing harm.

Here is a man or boy who has a love of goodness in him; far from perfect indeed; but good, as distinct from bad. To him come flocking all good influences, all opportunities for good. His very temptations seem to yield up their strength to him and make him better. Everything he sees, or reads, or does, seems to be clear gain.