Articles

We may receive much benefit from simply reading the Lesson-Sermons, but a time will come to each when he must not only read but study them, and then practise each lesson as it is learned. I was teaching a small country school in a foreign settlement, and one morning, a little girl presented me with two needles.

Some time ago my attention was drawn to the statement, "Reputation is not character," and the words made a lasting impression upon me. Many people confuse the one with the other, but there is a vast difference between them.

Eternity , infinity, and unity constitute the three dimensions of the Church or body of Christ. The first element of extension is linear, and as applied to the church suggests the idea of time, without beginning and without end.

To those who are trying to make the demonstration over distasteful characteristics of temperament, I would like to tell how I was greatly helped along this line. Only those who have fallen under the law of a quick temper can appreciate or understand the overcoming struggle, and what it means to tone the impulse down, so that the thought of quietness and gentleness may constantly express not only love to God but to mankind.

We have not a notion what an amount of waste of power there has been in our lives; we never measured out the odd corners and the undrained bits, and it never occurred to us what good fruit might be grown in our straggling hedgerows, nor how the shade of our trees has been keeping the sun from the scanty crops. And so, season by season, we shall be sometimes not a little startled, yet always very glad, as we find that bit by bit the Master shows how much more may be made of our ground, how much more He is able to make of it than we did; and we shall be willing to work under Him and do exactly what He points out, even if it comes to cutting down a shady tree or clearing out a ditch full of pretty weeds and wild-flowers.

Many writers have tried, both by argument and ridicule, to oppose the correctness of Christian Science in its claim that sin, disease, and death are human delusions. I have never known a critic of Christian Science to use the word "delusion" in the same sense that the Christian Scientist does, nor indeed in its true etymological sense.

In the endeavor to express our mental concepts there is often a keen sense of the inadequacy of speech fully to define them. Nevertheless, this does not justify us in manifesting a poverty of expression, or in using that which is ambiguous, obscure, or erroneous.

In his endeavor to impart to his disciples some conception of those spiritual truths which were to him the eternal realities of being, and which he was able to demonstrate in the healing of sickness and sin, the Master made use of similitudes and parables; and it is said that "without a parable spake he not unto them. " That these parables have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, in some instances teaching the very opposite of that which they were intended to teach, is evidenced by the radical changes that have been made from time to time in the various declarations of faith set forth by the different religious denominations in this and other lands.

No unwelcome tasks become any the less unwelcome by putting them off till to-morrow. It is only when they are behind us and done, that we begin to find that there is a sweetness to be tasted afterwards, and that the remembrance of unwelcome duties unhesitatingly done is welcome and pleasant.

Human ambitions, widely variant and diverse as they are in kind and degree, are yet easily reduced to common terms. Their least common denominator is clearly to be found in the thought of self-assertion or self-expression.