ed it to his customer. Now it
gleamed and flashed with all the glories of the rainbow. It needed the
touch and warmth of a human hand to bring out its iridescence. There
are human lives everywhere about us that are rich in their
possibilities of beauty and glory. No gems or jewels are so precious;
but as we see them in their earthly condition they are dull and
lustreless, without brightness or loveliness. Perhaps they are even
covered with stain and denied by sin. Yet they need only the touch of
the hand of Christ to bring out the radiance, the loveliness, the
beauty of the divine image in them. And you and I must be the hand of
Christ to these lustreless or stained lives. Touching them with our
warm love, the sleeping splendor that is in them, hidden mayhap under
sin's marring and ruin, will yet shine out, the beginning of glory for
them.

CHAPTER VI.

THE BLESSING OF A BURDEN.

"Then welcome each rebuff,
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand nor go.
Be our joys three parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"
--ROBERT BROWNING.

It is not always the easiest things that are the best things. Usually
we have to pay for any good thing about its full value. In all markets
commodities that cost little may be set down as worth but little. All
our blessings may be rated in the same way. If they come easily,
without great cost of effort or sacrifice, their value to us is not
great. But if we can get them only through self-denial, tears,
anguish, and pain, we may be sure that they hide in them the very gold
of God. So it is that many of our best and richest blessings come to
us in some form of rugged hardness.

Take what we call drudgery. Life is full of it. It begins in
childhood. There is school, with its set hours, its lessons, rules,
tables, tasks, recitations. Then, when we grow up, instead of getting
away from this bondage of routine, this interminable drudgery, it goes
on just as in childhood. It is rising at the same hour every morning,
and hurrying away to the day's tasks, and doing the same things over
and over, six days in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year, and on and
on unto life's end. For the great majority of us, there is almost no
break in the monotonous rounds of our days through the long years.
Many of us sigh and wish we might in some way free our