was very impressive to me, yet after a while the silence seemed too deep. After my soul had offered its silent worship, I longed to give praise with my voice too, or to listen to the praising voices of others. I thought of the glorious music that accompanies the words, "I know that my Redeemer liveth!" and I wished that I had the power to express such faith, in such grand changes of harmony. I called back to memory the wonderful voice that once had sung these words to me with convincing power; but memory brought them back silently, there was no sound. I opened the piano and tried to hear, in the changing chords of the Prayer from Moses in Egypt, the varying voices of a congregation. And then I went back to silence again, to kneel before God.

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

I have to recall the failure of my resolutions that I formed in the quiet of my last silent Sunday. I have to remember the passage of another week that has gone back to join many others as profitless.

How different will be our estimate of time, — the time that we have lived through,- when we

shall reach the world that is no longer so measured! Memory now is dazzled by the present. Then we shall make a truer judgment of the worth of past events. In looking back upon a past week, now, we are scarcely able to judge which of our acts had itself a real worth. We look back with a sort of exultation upon some three hours' labor, that seems to us worthy of great praise. It may not, then, count so much to us as one moment's patience, or, alas! a moment's impatience. A hasty word or glance that broke forth from a moment of impatience will not merely leave its impression on the moment that follows, but on the eternity in which we shall have time to recall it.

We do not show our value of time by sitting down to count its sands as they pass, nor by regretting those that have past. We may make

the moment that lies in our hand of value to ourselves or to others. We may waste it, by waiting, to wonder what we shall do with it. We cannot throw it away. Most frequently it comes to us labelled with its own duty or purpose; it needs only our earnestness to read this rightly and act upon it. Its value, of course, rests only in the way we use it. We cannot yet judge, ourselves, whether this will be because we have enjoyed that moment most, the sky and wayside flower; or because we have helped that moment a sufferer, shut up in a close street, out of reach of air or joy; or because we have that moment conquered some secret enemy of our heart, trampled down an evil passion, or turned away from some sorrow in our own soul, to join the happy chorus there is in God's creation. God, who has created a time for all things, knows best. We cannot judge. Yet at times we are supported by a courageous feeling at heart, that shows us when we have done the right thing at the right time. And at other times, we look back with a penetrating glance, and see more clearly than when the hour was passing,-see, sometimes with a shudder, when we have, and when we have not, acted simply, purely, and nobly. We see whether we have taken the gift of the moment joyfully and solemnly;-joyfully, because it is a gift; solemnly, because it is a gift of God's.

SERMON.

"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."-2 Peter iii. 8.

There seems to be a contradiction in this statement, and yet we immediately see how it is reconciled.

We cannot understand the meaning of the words to be, that God beholds with serene indifference all the fluctuations in the ever-swelling tide of earth's joys and sorrows. We cannot understand by the statement, that a day or a thousand years are alike nothing to God; for this would be the same as declaring that the events with which a day or a century is crowned are nothing to him, which would amount to the same as saying that there is no such thing as Divine Providence.

We obviously understand, however, from our text, that, by the Eternal Being, events and actions are not measured according to the length of time which they occupy, but according to their moral significance; not by their duration, but by their quality.

It is upon the same principle that money is weighed in the scales of divine wisdom. It is not the vast amount which sinks down the scale; it is the two mites devoted to his cause by one who, when they are bestowed, has nothing left but faith

in his God's protection. She is the rich person in God's eye who has the wealth of heart to make such a sacrifice, while he who, even out of the abundance that he hath, refuses to give back aught to the great Being from whom he has received all, as he is seen from the battlements of heaven, appears stricken with poverty, covered with rags.

And so in regard to time. Those ancient dynasties whose power has reached through long centuries, handed down from father to son,-men say of them, What a noble family! how glorious. to be the founder of a race who should hold the throne for a thousand years! Glorious! How much longer in its influence than many such thousands of years, was that one day on which, in Judæa, that meek sufferer laid down his life for his friends! And how must it have appeared to the Infinite Mind, who sees the end from the beginning! And how much more space in the chronicle of eternity must one day which records the self-denying love of some unknown follower of Jesus occupy, than the thousand years' history of some line of pampered monarchs!

Let us then bear in mind, that mere duration does not appear to God as it does to us; that he is not oppressed by the contemplation of vast periods of time, nor unable rightly to estimate the opportunities of good provided for his children in one small day.