This was an emphatic rule of St. Paul: "Behold, now is the accepted time." A lost opportunity is the greatest of losses. Whittier mourned it as what "might have been." We own no past, no future, we possess only, now. If the reliable now is carelessly lost in speaking or in acting, it comes not back again. Whatever needs to be done that cannot be done now, God prepares the way for doing; while that which can be done now, but is not, increases our indebtedness to God. Faith in divine Love supplies the ever-present help and now, and gives the power to act in the living present.
The dear children's good deeds are gems in the settings of manhood and womanhood. The good they desire to do, they insist upon doing, now. They speculate neither on the past, present, nor future but taking no thought for the morrow act in God's time.
A book, by Benjamin Wills Newton, called "Thoughts on the Apocalypse," and published at London, Eng., in 1853,—Mr. Marcus Holmes, K. C., presented to me in 1903,—the first that I had even heard of it. When scanning its interesting pages my attention was arrested by the following: "The Church at Jerusalem, like a sun in the center of its system, had other churches, like so many planets, revolving around it. It was strictly a mother and a ruling church." According to his description, the Church of Jerusalem seems to prefigure the Mother Church at Boston.
