how different a year to look back upon ! How many opportunities neglected altogether! How many but weakly and slackly employed! Opportunities that can never come again, that, employed or neglected, are past now. The word that might have done infinite good, but that was not spokencowardice, weak complaisance, in a word, worldliness, God's enemy, fettered the tongue: excuses were ready, though the heart did not believe them, and God's soldier failed, and the devil had the better of that field. Again, actions, that sloth or love of worldly ease caused to die out into smoke when they should have been eager leaping fire. An opportunity came, once and again, of doing something for God. The duty was a laborious one, a painful one; nevertheless, however painful, it must be done; you had resolved that it should be done; you had even sought help upon your knees for the work. But mark the carnal coward spirit creeping over the spiritual manly resolve a friend came in, a persuasion turned you; your heart, alas! hardly really in earnest, did not set itself as a flint to its purpose; too willing to be turned aside, it basely accepted the tempting excuse, and laboured thereupon to believe itself really acquitted from the duty. Those opportunities passed away, the noble action was not done, the faithful word was never spoken, the heart's reproaches became dull, and the duty ceased its ceaseless gnawing at the conscience. But amid the fitful sinking and falling of the firelight and the bells as you sit on the rug, hand-shading your eyes the neglected opportunity comes back, with all its reproach, even newer and keener than at the first; back again to accuse your faint-heartedness, to upbraid your lukewarm

love; to tell you of One who died for you, and yet for whom you shirk the least distasteful labour, the least taking up the cross, and denying yourself to follow Him.

And, besides all this, when you think of the whole past year, even of its hours (how few, and how grudged !) when you have tried to do the work which the Master put into your power to perform for Him, how conscious you are of the want of heart in even your best endeavours; you cannot but feel how hard the world's votaries have been working for their master, and how slackly you have been labouring for your Master and only Saviour-how they have been running, with eyes fixed on the goal; and how you have been hobbling and limping, looking behind, and on this side and on that, not with single purpose, pressing towards the mark—ah, no!

And you think, then, what this life might have been—might be. A life that looked straight forward, that turned not to the right hand nor to the left, that paused for no alluring of pleasure, for no constraining of business

"This way and that dividing the swift mind,"

and wasting its energy and powers. A life that set God first, utterly first; that shouldered aside the world's jostling, distracting importunities; that left the little concerns, the little loves, the little jealousies of this brief life, staring after its eager, swift, stedfast advance, whenever they would have interposed to hinder it. A life that really and in good earnest, not half-heartedly and in pretence, should leave all to follow Christ. Something of the unflinching, unswerving, unpausing persistency of those old Jesuits; only in the service of Christ,

and not in that of the Pope and the Inquisition. You think of a St. Paul, and his onward, onward still, "in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness," and you think of your lagging, loitering- !

Ah, well, that is best: on your knees once more, for pardon and for grace-grace to love Him more and serve Him better in the year so near at hand! God shall wipe away all those tears that love for Him made to flow, and the blessed Saviour's perfect righteousness shall hide all our vile and miserable rags; yet even the saved, we can almost fancy, will wish with a feeling akin to regret, to have loved the blessed Lord more; and he who has gained but five pounds will surely wish that it had been ten. For our opportunities, it often seems to me, are such as angels might long to have. Where all are serving God, and we have no longer a sinful nature dragging us back, nor a glittering world around us, nor a subtle tempter at our ear—it will seem little, methinks, to serve God then and there. But now, and here, in a world lying in wickedness, where the more part are not on Christ's side, but rather leagued with or deserters to the devil, the world, and the flesh-oh, what an Abdiel opportunity to stand up, a speaking, living protest in life's least and greatest thought, word, and act; a burning and a shining light, reflecting the beams of the Sun of Righteousness in a dark and naughty world!

Ah, may this quiet hour of thought, of regretful meditation, by God's grace, be the point on which you have collected your powers and energies for a forward spring, that shall not grow slack through eternity!