MARCH.

MARCH 1.

AID TO THOUGHT IN AFFLICTION.

What God takes from us, it is always gain to lose. He gives back to us our friends more deeply, more tenderly, more sacredly, after they have been taken from us by death. When they become wholly His, they are more intimately ours. The intimacy before death pertains more to the flesh and its senses; after death it pertains more to the spirit and its inmost affections. It is as though God gave them to us out of His own bosom, with the holiness and fragrance of the divine nature added to them. By death they become too chaste, too heavenly for our light moods, and our common hours; they visit us only in our holiest moments. They act upon us therefore as motives to prayer, watchfulness, and

retirement of spirit. They greatly befriend our best interests. As the Lord, before His death, was "with" his friends, but afterwards "in" them, so our holiest friends help us the more, when they put off flesh, and are no more seen.

(Pulsford.)

March 2

BENEFIT OF ADVERSITY.

It is good for man to suffer the adversity of this earthly life: for it brings him back to the sacred retirement of the heart, where only he finds he is an exile from his native home, and ought not to place his trust in any worldly enjoyment. It is good for him also to meet with contradictions and reproach; and to be evil thought of, and evil spoken of, even when his intentions are upright, and his actions blameless; for this keeps him humble, and is a powerful antidote to the poison of vain-glory; and then chiefly it is that we have recourse to the witness within us which is God; when we are outwardly despised, and held in no degree of esteem and favour among men. Our dependence upon God ought to be so entire and absolute,

that we should never think it necessary, in any kind of distress, to have recourse to human con(Thomas a' Kempis.)

solations.

March 3.

THE OBEDIENCE OF INSTINCT-THE OBEDIENCE

OF THE HEART.

When a man, in some measure aware of his backsliding, waywardness, and rebellion, observes how perfectly the unintelligent creation obeys its Creator's law, he bitterly laments his own lawlessness, and envies the happy loyalty of inferior beings. Earth, air, and sea, obey the laws which have been imposed upon them. Organic nature is obedient, from the lowest type of vegetation up through all the grades of animal life until you come to man. The study of nature we know will not convert a sinner; but the deficiency lies in the untowardness of the scholar, as much as in the dimness of the book. If the learner were apt and willing, he might be both put to shame and turned round to righteousness by the sight of flowers and insects. How perseveringly, constantly, and cheerfully do all these creatures perform the functions for

which they are fitted, and exert to the utmost all their powers! They neither waste their talents in idleness, nor injure their faculties by running counter to the law of their being. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard," and not to the ant only: every sinless creature of God is an articulate reproof to man. Those servants who have received only one talent have laid it out faithfully in the Master's work: but those who have received ten have either hid their gifts in the earth, or used them in rebellion against the sovereign Giver.

But while we may gather from the survey a needful reproof, we may also turn the reproof into a cheering promise. The complete obedience of creatures, which never having been elevated could not be broken by a fall, may become a polished mirror where faith will see reflected the far more glorious obedience of a higher intelligence, when the wounds of its fall will have been completely healed. As a sinful creature, with an evil heart of unbelief, departing from the living God, I have cause to envy, as it were, the instinct of irrational creatures, which always guides them in the direction of their Maker's will; but when I am forgiven and renewed, when