ut, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. I
have seen almost all the beautiful things God has made; I have enjoyed
almost every pleasure that He has planned for man; and yet as I look
back I see standing out above all the life that has gone four or five
short experiences, when the love of God reflected itself in some poor
imitation, some small act of love of mine, and these seem to be the
things which alone of all one's life abide. Everything else in all our
lives is transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the acts of
love which no man knows about, or can ever know about--they never
fail.

In the Book of Matthew, where the Judgment Day is depicted for us in
the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep from
the goats, the test of a man then is not, "How have I believed?" but
"How have I loved?" The test of religion, the final test of religion,
is not religiousness, but Love. I say the final test of religion at
that great Day is not religiousness, but Love; not what I have done,
not what I have believed, not what I have achieved, but how I have
discharged the common charities of life. Sins of commission in that
awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we have not done,
_by sins of omission_, we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For
the withholding of love is the negation of the spirit of Christ, the
proof that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It means
that He suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He inspired
nothing in all our lives, that we were not once near enough to Him,
to be seized with the spell of His compassion for the world. It means
that--

"I lived for myself, I thought for myself,
For myself, and none beside--
Just as if Jesus had never lived,
As if He had never died."

Thank God the Christianity of today is coming nearer the world's need.
Live to help that on. Thank God men know better, by a hair's breadth,
what religion is, what God is, who Christ is, where Christ is. Who is
Christ? He who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick.
And where is Christ? Where?--"Whoso shall receive a little child in My
name receiveth Me." And who are Christ's? "Every one that loveth is
born of God."

LESSONS FROM THE ANGELUS.

God often speaks to men's souls through music; He also speaks to us
through art. Millet's famous painting entitled "The Angelus" is an
illuminated text, upon which I am going to say