for your good, and if you learn to obey Him now you will make the best start in life.

Take His word for your guide.

Read it, study it, and obey it. You will never be lost while you are following that guide. He will guide you into all truth. Keep God's commandments. Let it be your pride to be good. You cannot all be great, but you may every one be good. Give your heart to God. Love Him, and show your love to Him by serving and honouring Him. Be loyal to truth. Never play the traitor to God. Be true to Him,

He warns

and give Him a life of faithful service and constant obedience. you to flee from the wrath to come. Do it, and do it now. He offers to pardon all your sins if you confess and forsake them. Repent and seek His forgiveness. He offers to guide you through all the difficulties of life, and bring you to Himself at last. Accept His offer. Obey Him.

You have visited a garden of flowers on a fine summer's morning. A snail has been among the flowers, and you can trace it by its slimy track. It has spoiled a leaf here, and ruined a flower there. Whatever it has touched is spoiled. It is just so with sin, and every sin you commit is an act of disobedience to God. Begin with man's first disobedience, which made our first parents leave Paradise, and trace the slimy track of disobedience. You find it on every page of history. Disobedience turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, and ruined Achan and his house. Disobedience produces ruin and misery everywhere, and if ever you miss heaven and find your way to hell, it will be by your own disobedience to God.

When you have done wrong, and brought suffering and shame on yourselves, you do not like to think, "It is all my own fault. I have nobody to blame but myself." And yet if you perish at last the bitterest thought about hell will be, "I might have been in heaven if I would. Hell was

not prepared for me, but for the devil and his angels. I would disobey God. Jesus died to save me from it, and I rejected His mercy and despised His love. My ruin is all my own fault."

Just think of the words of Jesus, "I would, but ye would not." He throws all the blame of your ruin on yourselves. "Because I have called,

and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded. I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear

LESSON VIII.

WHAT THE SERPENT TEACHES.

Text:

-"Be ye therefore wise as serpents."-MATTHEW x. 16.

OUR next text holds up the serpent for our study. Serpents are not natives of this country. We have nothing of the kind here larger than the viper. In hot countries, however, the serpent is exceedingly common. It varies in size from ten or twelve inches to several feet. The first lesson I want you to learn is:

1. It is not always safe to judge of people by their looks.

The word serpent means a creeping animal. It is a name given to snakes, vipers, adders, and other reptiles of a similar kind. You may see from the picture what kind of animals they are. The serpent's head is small, and its eye exceedingly bright. Its teeth are sharp, and in most kinds the sting is charged with poison. It has a long, smooth body, and its skin is marked all over of different colours. It crawls or creeps on the ground without legs or feet, but it can climb trees and creep into houses without any difficulty.

If you were to see two or three living serpents in a cage, and watch them at play, you would think them the prettiest and most harmless creatures in the world. They move so gracefully, and their colours look so well in the sunshine, that you would be delighted to watch them. Judged by their looks

I

you would not be afraid of them. You would think them harmless and innocent.

And I am told that if you were their keeper you might play with them occasionally, and touch them without receiving any injury. But they are exceedingly dangerous and deadly. They are never safe. They will bite the hand that feeds them. They will kill their keeper.

The men at the Zoological Gardens who take care of the serpents, and feed them, are always careful about being bitten. One morning a serpent had escaped from its cage, and was wandering about the room. The keeper

wanted to catch it and put it back, so he pulled off his jacket and threw it over its head. Then he laid firmly hold of it and carried it to its cage. If the serpent had seized the man instead of the man seizing the serpent, it would have killed him.

The serpent has two ways of killing its prey. One kind do so by folding themselves round the body and crushing it to death, others by stinging, or biting with the poison fang or tooth. This is hollow, and when pressed a drop of poison flows through the hollow tooth, and drops into the wound that has been made. This poison mixes with the blood, and in a very few hours at most the victim dies in the greatest agony.

You must not judge serpents by their looks. They appear mild and gentle, but they are dangerous and deadly.

Now the lesson I want to enforce is one that children are very slow to learn. They can seldom be brought readily to believe that “ Things are not what they seem."

When I was a child at home we had an ornamental orange. It was made of stone, and very cleverly carved and painted to imitate a real orange. Many a time in childish ignorance I have seized that stone orange and tried to bite and suck it. It took a long time to convince me that it was only a sham. And since then I have offered it to scores of children who have been very slow to learn that things are not what they seem.

The sooner you learn this lesson, my dear friends, the better. You will meet with all sorts of shams and deceivers in your journey through life.